InferLane Exchange — Arbiter Agreement

Drafted + reviewed by Claude. Captures arbiters' commitments
drawn from professional-opinion liability frameworks (expert-witness
jurisprudence in AU/UK/US), independent-contractor patterns
(mirroring §2 of the Operator Agreement), and the Schelling-vote
aggregation contract documented in WORKFLOW-ARCHITECTURE.md §6.

1. Parties

This Arbiter Agreement ("Agreement") is between InferLane, operated by its founder as a sole trader in Victoria, Australia ("InferLane", "we", "us") operating the InferLane Exchange marketplace, and the individual or entity registered as an arbiter ("Arbiter", "you").

This Agreement is version 0.1.0 — the version the arbiter registration flow requires you to accept (POST /api/exchange/arbiters, acceptedAgreementVersion: "0.1.0"). It is published at inferlane.dev/legal/arbiter-agreement. It is supplemental to, and incorporates by reference, the InferLane Exchange Terms of Service.

2. Independent professional opinion — load-bearing framing

Per LEGAL-PERIMETER.md §1: arbiters render independent professional opinions on whether an operator's submission satisfies a buyer's rubric. The marketplace does not render verdicts; it computationally aggregates independent opinions via Schelling-point voting.

This framing is structural, not cosmetic:

(a) Your attestation is your own analysis, not a marketplace

determination;

(b) The marketplace publishes the aggregate but attributes the

underlying opinions to the rendering arbiters;

you are an independent expert whose opinion the buyer paid the attestation fee to obtain;

(d) Your opinion liability runs to the standards of the

professional-opinion category in your jurisdiction (analogous to expert-witness practice), not employer/employee.

3. Independence — load-bearing rules

By accepting an assignment, you warrant that:

Your attestation reflects your independent judgment formed after

reviewing the submission against the rubric as written;

You have not communicated with the buyer, the operator, or any

other arbiter assigned to the same submission, about this submission;

You hold no undisclosed conflict of interest with the buyer or

operator (employer, family member, OSS co-maintainer of the target repo, equity holder, contracted advisor);

You have not been induced to vote a particular way by promise of

reward, threat, or any other consideration outside the marketplace's standard attestation fee;

Where you used AI assistance to form your opinion, you reviewed

the AI's output critically and the final opinion reflects your judgment, not unfiltered AI scoring.

A breach of any of (1)–(5) is grounds for immediate bond forfeiture + account termination + permanent disqualification from future marketplace participation.

4. Bond posture

You post a bond at registration (default minimum: $50 USD). The bond is held by the marketplace as collateral against:

Schelling-overrule debits (when your vote is in the minority and

the dispute resolution favors the majority's position);

Independence violations (full bond forfeiture grounds);
Fraudulent attestations (grounds for forfeiture + criminal referral

where applicable).

Your bond is returned on account closure provided no debits or holds are outstanding. The bond minimum may be raised on a per-arbiter basis if your dispute-overrule rate exceeds tolerance thresholds (documented in WORKFLOW-ARCHITECTURE.md).

5. Independent contractor

Same operating-practice constraints as the Operator Agreement §2 apply. Specifically:

You set your own hours;
You may decline any assignment within the assignment-acceptance

window without penalty;

You bring your own tools (LLMs, IDEs, infrastructure);
You may attest on competing marketplaces;
No exclusivity, no benefits, no withholding, no employment

relationship.

You are responsible for your own taxes on attestation fees you earn. The marketplace does not withhold; you remit your own income, self-employment, and sales/GST taxes as applicable in your jurisdiction.

6. SLA + replacement

You commit to rendering attestation within arbiterSlaHours (default 4 hours) of assignment. Missing the SLA:

(a) Marks your assignment abandoned;
(b) Triggers an arbiter-SLA-miss sweep that assigns a replacement

arbiter to preserve the Schelling-vote pool;

forfeit bond (the marketplace recognizes that operators sometimes miss tasks too — repeated misses, not isolated ones, escalate).

7. Schelling-vote economics

When the aggregate is computed:

Majority arbiters receive the attestation fee + a pro-rata

share of forfeited minority fees;

Minority arbiters forfeit the attestation fee but retain bond

unless overruled by dispute resolution;

Tie-break order (per Schelling-vote helper):

needs_revision > fail > pass.

The marketplace publishes the aggregate; the marketplace does not render the verdict. This distinction matters for liability framing under §2.

8. Quality-assurance audit tasks — disclosure

The marketplace seeds a small number of quality-assurance audit tasks (internally, "ghost tasks") into the live assignment pool. An audit task is a real, escrow-funded task with a known ground-truth outcome set by the marketplace. You are paid the normal attestation fee for audit tasks exactly as you are for ordinary tasks.

You acknowledge and agree that:

(a) **An audit task is intentionally indistinguishable from a real

task** from your perspective — the assignment, the materials you review, the Schelling-vote flow, and the ledger settlement are the same. You will not always be able to tell whether a given assignment is an audit task, and you agree not to treat any assignment differently on suspicion that it might be one;

(b) The marketplace records your vote on audit tasks against the

known ground truth to measure per-arbiter accuracy, detect bad-faith or random voting, and surface possible collusion signals (multiple arbiters voting the same wrong answer together);

inform reputation and manual review but do not by themselves trigger automated bond debits or suspension. The marketplace may introduce graduated, published consequences for sustained audit-task inaccuracy in a future phase, on notice under §13;

(d) Audit-task escrow is funded by the marketplace; operators and

arbiters are paid real fees on audit tasks. This is the cost of the audit signal, disclosed to you here.

This disclosure exists so that the audit mechanism is consented to, not concealed. Rendering your good-faith independent opinion on every assignment (per §3 and §10) is the only behavior the audit measures — an arbiter who attests honestly has nothing to manage around it.

9. Disputes + overrule

If a buyer files a dispute and admin resolution favors the buyer (outcome=buyer), the majority arbiters who voted pass are considered overruled. In Phase 1, overrule does not automatically debit bond (the marketplace acknowledges first-instance disputes can turn on facts unavailable at attestation time). Phase 1.5 will introduce a graduated bond-debit schedule for repeat-overrule arbiters.

10. Liability + indemnification

Your attestation is offered in good faith as a professional opinion. You are not liable to the buyer or any downstream party for the business consequences of acting on your opinion provided you complied with §3 (independence) and §11 (good-faith standard). This Agreement is not a guarantee of merchantability or fitness for purpose; the buyer's recourse for bad outcomes is the dispute process, not litigation against arbiters.

You indemnify the marketplace against any third-party claim arising out of (a) your breach of §3 independence rules, (b) your fraudulent or willfully-misleading attestation, or (c) your disclosure of buyer/operator confidential information obtained during attestation.

Nothing in this section excludes or limits any liability that cannot lawfully be excluded or limited, including under the Australian Consumer Law where it applies.

11. Good-faith standard

You commit to:

Reading the submission diff in full before scoring;
Running mechanical gates (where applicable) before scoring;
Producing per-criterion scores that bear a reasonable relationship

to the submitted code, not flat passes/fails regardless of content;

Writing reasoning (the attestationReasoning field) that explains

your scoring with enough specificity that another arbiter could follow it.

The marketplace does not require any specific evaluation methodology (LLM-as-judge vs. human review vs. hybrid is your choice), but the output must reflect actual evaluation, not rubber-stamping.

12. Account suspension + termination

Marketplace may suspend or terminate your arbiter account for:

Repeated SLA misses (3+ in any 30-day window);
Sustained dispute-overrule rate above threshold (TBD; published

on the transparency dashboard once windowed metrics ship);

Independence violations (single instance is grounds);
Fraudulent attestations (single instance is grounds + bond

forfeiture + potential referral);

Sustained bond-balance below minimum without prompt top-up.

You may close your account at any time via the dashboard. In-flight assignments must be completed or marked abandoned before closure finalizes.

13. Governing law + dispute resolution

This Agreement is governed by the laws of Victoria, Australia, without regard to conflict-of-laws principles. Any dispute that cannot be resolved through good-faith discussion will be resolved in the courts of Victoria, Australia, except that either party may seek injunctive relief in any court of competent jurisdiction. You waive class-action and mass-arbitration participation to the extent permitted by your jurisdiction; if a court holds the class waiver unenforceable, that waiver is severed and the remainder of this section continues to apply. Where mandatory local law in your jurisdiction overrides a contractual choice of law, that local law prevails to the extent required.

This matches the governing-law posture of the InferLane Exchange Terms of Service. If a future incorporation (e.g. a Delaware C-corporation) changes the operating entity, this clause will be updated on notice under §14.

14. Changes to this Agreement

Marketplace may update this Agreement on 30 days' notice via in-app notification to your registered email. Continued use after the effective date constitutes acceptance. If you do not accept the updated terms, your remedy is to close your account before the effective date and complete any in-flight assignments under the then-current terms.

15. Acknowledgment

By registering as an arbiter, you acknowledge that you have read, understood, and accepted this Agreement (version 0.1.0) and the related InferLane Exchange Terms of Service.

Drafting note — re-review triggers:

- §1 parties + §13 governing law — re-review the moment the operator
incorporates (a Delaware C-corporation is planned). The sole-trader
framing and the Victoria seat both change at that point. Owner must
also insert the operator's legal name + ABN at the marker above
before this Agreement is relied on.
- §2 professional-opinion framing — re-review if any arbiter is
sued by a buyer or operator for the consequences of an
attestation; jurisdiction-specific defamation regimes (especially
UK + JP) interact with this framing in ways that depend on the
factual posture of the dispute.
- §3 independence + §11 good-faith standard — re-review on the
first arbitration that hinges on whether an arbiter met the
expert-witness standard of care.
- §4 bond model — re-review if regulators in any supported
jurisdiction reclassify our bond as a consumer-credit or
surety-bond instrument.
- §8 quality-assurance audit tasks — re-review when automated
consequences (bond debit / suspension) for audit-task inaccuracy
move out of record-only mode; the move requires published
thresholds and 30 days' notice under §14.
- §10 indemnification + liability cap — re-review if AU Consumer
Law §23 (unfair-contract-terms) jurisprudence develops in a
direction that limits liability caps in B2B-platform contracts.