[Terr_]

I agree it looks like someone tried to handle the thorny cases, but without real force of law protecting the corpsicles (perhaps revive-able, perhaps not) then it makes me think of "greater fool" investments, except in this case it might be charitably amended to "greater altruist".

Every person buying in--or perhaps checking in--to the system needs to trust that there's another person coming after them who is equally-invested in the projects' success, and at least able to pay the power/maintenance bills.

Somewhat aside, the fiction book Cryoburn (a long way through the excellent Vorkosigan saga) does explore some of these issues in the background: The protagonist visits a planet where the frozen citizens have their voting-rights delegated to whichever corporations hold their storage/revival contracts. (In fact, some corporations are even trying to commoditize contracts so that they can be traded, in a likely allusion to CDOs during the 2008 property crash.)

[sbierwagen]

>perhaps revive-able, perhaps not

One of the core problems of cryonics is the suite of technologies needed to revive a person from the frozen state and then fix whatever was wrong with them before freezing is indistinguishable from physical immortality. So once we can revive corpsicles, nobody will ever be frozen again! So there's no situation where you could actually get that tested body of law around corpsicle rights.

The cryonicsphile response is, of course, that the alternative is death. Even if there's a 1 in 100 chance of being thawed, even if you're legally enslaved to pay off the unfreezing debt or are returned as an uploaded brain in a computer, that's still better than rotting in the ground, right?

[Terr_]

I agree there's a problem there, but I don't think it's quite that absolute, since people might be frozen for other reasons.

For example:

1. A patient with a rabies diagnosis, awaiting a future treatment.

2. Someone born with with muscular dystrophy, waiting for a retrogenic cure.

3. Someone who has simply run out of time to wait for a difficult to find donor organ.

4. The victim of gross physical trauma where there are too many. Holes to plug and things to sew and tubes to reconnect for it to be done safely in a warm state.

Any of those things could provide the necessary legal test cases without implying anything about whether we've cracked functional immortality or not.