Legal and Contractual Framework for the VO

This chapter describes the legal and contractual considerations for organisations wishing to use ICT in their virtual organisation. The chapter describes a number of legal and contractual conditions, (mainly contracts), that must be met to enable legal and contractually valid transactions amongst the VO participants. These contracts and how to achieve them using software tools is described. These tools enable organisations to send electronic transactions in a secure and legally valid manner using technology that is readily available and easy to use. How this can be achieved is described. Bringing all this information together the chapter concludes with a small case study where a description of how these tools have been used in the VO environment is given.