Editing Round 9/History (section)

=== Ownership vs. Possession ===

Here's another question: is ownership different than possession? One might be inclined to argue that they are the same. They are after all, near synonyms. The opposition might claim, however, that the intent of the passage "[w]hen the duck is on the scouting mission, the duck is no longer in possession of the player, thus benefits the duck provides the player are paused" from the Rule Ducks, Subrule Scouting of the time<ref>https://infinitenomic.miraheze.org/w/index.php?title=Round_9/Ruleset&oldid=721#Scouting</ref> is that the duck is still ''owned'' by the player, but not ''possessed''. What if "ownership" implies only that you own the duck while "possession" grants authority to perform actions with the duck? This interpretation seems to go against the legislative intent of the passage "[u]pon joining the game, a duck is created in the possession of each player" from the un-subruled section of the Rule Ducks in the same revision of the ruleset.

Two issues seemed to depend on the outcome of this debate: first, the issue of irretrievable ducks mentioned above; and second, the fact that it seemed that players could not interact with their ducks until giving it a name ''and'' assigning it to a pond, a logical impossibility.

The official ruling on this matter from Judge Random Internet Cat was that there was "no natural language reason to draw a distinction between [the terms ownership and possession]<ref>[[Round 9/Rulings#Ruling 2]]</ref>". With a growing sentiment towards textualism, many were inclined to follow this interpretation.

It was decided, however, that the relationship between the player and the duck who was on a scouting mission was different, thus ducks could still be retrieved safely<ref>[[Round 9/Rulings#Ruling 3]]</ref>. Furthermore, we realized that, due to a quirk of the Ducks rule, any instances of the word "duck" actually meant "named duck" within that rule. Ponds was a subrule of Ducks. Thus, as long as a player assigned their duck a name before assigning it a pond, they could still interact with them. This was 

This was not, however, the end of the issue. Nyhilo, a newer player at the time and a firm believer in the concept of ownership and possession being separate, began work on a very large proposal to legally separate the two concepts, allowing for a generalized and flexible system. During the last week of February, Nyhilo built and revised this 1500 word proposal. Revisions of this proposal were stored using a HackMD page<ref>https://hackmd.io/Dpp4b8-TSGqpvdpLxynmRA?both=</ref>. In the end, the proposal was dropped as Nyhilo decided that it wasn't actually necessary.

One bit of legislation that came about from this debacle was a proposal to allow players to assign names and ponds to their ducks if either was undefined, which passed without incident (Nyhilo, Proposal Pond Stuck Pond Suck, 2 Mar 2021).