Bitcoin Forum

Inspired by Topic: Legal Research (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=115257.0;all) in which there is a debate about whether a bitcoin private key can be considered property which endows rights on the owner, specifically the right to compute some mathematical functions which transfer a perceived value to another individual.

Well, there was a previous, very long, thread about intellectual property here (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=38854.0), in which many contributors rejected Intellectual Property Rights (call this the anti-IPR position) - for example, if one can somehow obtain a digital copy of a Hollywood blockbuster, then he is fully within his rights to view it and make additional copies at will; no-one can tell him how he should utilize his physical property (the computer). The information bits composing the film (or game or mp3) are not considered property.

Well, it seems perfectly clear that bitcoin private keys cannot ever be considered physical property. If they are to be considered property at all, it can only be as intellectual property - like an mp3, they are merely strings of bits.

This would seem to be a problem for anyone who holds anti-IPR pro-bitcoin positions. If someone, by manipulating his computer, manages to hack and obtain some bitcoin private keys (and, obviously, the associated bitcoins), then, according to anti-IPR, no theft has taken place and no anti-IPR judicial system will recognize a loss.  Any physical attempt to recover the bitcoins would thus be unlawful.

It's not clear to me, though, what the anti-IPR position on hacking is. I mean, a hacker is merely issuing instructions to his own hardware which make it transmit certain bits of information, right? No-one can deny him that...  ???  And the hacked party is free to program his own hardware to act, or not to act, on receipt of those bits of information... ???

Obviously, numbers (including private keys) are not property. Using them to misrepresent yourself as someone else may, in some cases, be a form of fraud. I do not think that applies to Bitcoin, however, since the only thing you are really representing is that you have the private key, which is perfectly true. There is no actual property involved to substantiate a claim of fraud.

Hacking isn't really a question of IPR; the central question is whether, by sending commands to your PC and causing it to act contrary to the wishes of its owner, the hacker has trespassed on the owner's physical property rights in the PC. The counter-argument would naturally be that a hacker can't cause the PC to do anything it wasn't programmed to do by the owner, by accident or default if not deliberate intent. I lean more toward the latter camp, but I will admit that the trespass argument has some merit.

Assuming the trespass argument is discarded, where does that leave us regarding hacking? I would say that we are left with contracts. Specifically, the end-user's contract with their ISP, the ISP's contract with their upstream provider, and contracts between ISPs and backhaul providers. These contracts should prohibit use of the connection for hacking, specify administrative procedure and penalties, and require similar provisions on the part of anyone connecting to the same network. Anyone caught hacking could then be kicked from the network and/or fined for breach of contract.

There's always the good old "Theft of power" and "Theft of services"

Private keys are clearly not "intellectual property" of any kind though.

me likey

Is this a genuine anti-IPR position, or is it something that just occurred to you now? Is there such a thing as "theft of power"? Wouldn't that be just revolution? I don't understand your reference to "theft of service". What does that mean? Is it possible to steal a service? Wouldn't that just mean enslaving the service provider and so have no relevance to bitcoin private keys?

Aren't there any anti-IPR pro-bitcoin libertarians here willing to tackle this issue? Seems thorny enough to me.

Power of the I*V=W kind. Hackers have been charged with this since by hacking into systems, they are using power on that systems that they haven't paid for or been authorized to use. Theft of services is more usually used for cable (the TV kind, not the spools) but I think may have been applied in similar cases.

What issue exactly? 
Do you mean the question of whether it's OK for you to pick up a $100 bill that I leave on the floor?   
I'm not sure there's anything new here, but that doesn't mean there aren't issues to debate about property rights. 

No. It's more like you leave your wallet (I mean wallet that holds banknotes etc, not bitcoin wallet) on the table in a restaurant. I pass by, grab the wallet, and take your $100 bill.  In a sense, your wallet is a piece of hardware that dumbly responds to "commands" given by my fingers: "open", "extract $100", "close". Like a hacked computer, in some sense.

It is obvious that I could have looked at your driving license and returned the wallet to you, intact. It's further obvious that the wallet and its contents are someone's "property".

This is not the case with a bitcoin private key (BPK) - recall I'm hypothesizing anti-IPR. BPKs cannot be considered property, just like an mp3.

Let's make another example. It's anti-IPR world again, and Mr. X is a bitcoin user. He doesn't risk leaving bitcoins on his computer so he takes a printout of his BPKs and stores it in his wallet (the banknote kind). Mr Y finds the wallet and, being a good citizen, returns the wallet to its owner complete with all the contents.  However, before doing so he makes a copy of the BPKs and later that day extracts the associated bitcoins. The printout is clearly Mr X's property, but what about the number written on it?

No moreso than the numbers on your credit cards. IP tends to protect creative works and does not apply to numbers (that creative works can be represented at numbers is sometimes brought out but that's another discussion).

Well, bitcoin private keys are creative works, of a sort - created by a software on the user's instruction. A vanity address might be considered more creative. But, yeah, numbers can't be copyright. Though when the Bluray decryption key (or was it DVD) was cracked, people started putting it on t-shirts shouting "freedom of speech" 'cos the industry tried its damnedest to stop anyone from copying what was, effectively, a number.

But, let's remember, I'm not talking about today's society. I'm talking specifically about an anti-IPR society, e.g. a libertarian society. This forum is full of libs and I'm surprised none have weighed in on this thread. How could a lib, in a lib (ie NAP etc) society, justify taking action against someone who copied their private keys? Indeed, this might even apply to GPG keys, SSH keys, any kind of "secret number".

I find it interesting what you say about the numbers on a credit card. Yeah, they're jut numbers, but if someone asks you to pay for a new TV and you quote numbers that do not "belong" to you, that'd be considered fraud. In some sense, bitcoin private keys are a bit like a credit card number - a digital money MUST (obviously) be really just a bunch of special numbers. Any society, therefore, that does not prohibit the illicit copying of these numbers cannot use digital money. If it is not possible to apply special protection to certain classes of data, digital money cannot be utilized.

That's the key, it's fraud. Not really anything to do with "intellectual property"

You cannot infer that because an mp3 is a string of numbers and a bitcoin address is a string of numbers that the bitcoin address is IP because the thing an mp3 represents is also IP'd.
It's a logical fallacy.
You infer that because two things share a propertie they must share this other property.
Without any other information this is a false assumption.

You should first define what IP is, and then see if it applies to a bitcoin addres. And leave the mp3 out of it. MAYBE you will find out that the address should be IP in the same way an mp3 is, but you cannot decide beforehand and based on other random properties like that it is representable as numeral information.
For instance, the bible can be represented like a string of numbers, but there is no IP on it.
And there are mp3's that altho they are strings of numbers, are completely IP free.
So the fact that you're dealing with a string of numbers does not imply IP in any way.

You're confusing Intelectual Property with just normal general Property.
IP is a very specific subcategory of property that was invented to allow creative people to produce something they can sell without other people ripping off their ideas.
You cannot generalize that to all information produced by human action.
The best way to protect things like personal numbers is to think of its unique properties and place in society and make laws that fit that situation.
Making it too general will create a whole set of new problems which are not solved easily as information is a tricky substance.

Except that "intellectual property" is not a real thing, it's just a concept invented with the intent to confuse and conflate the idea with real property to provoke stronger protection

Not quite.
It is just a device invented to protect the livelyhood of creative folks.
What completely screwed it up was the relatively recent extentions of length of this right so even grand-children of the holder can profit. That is of course bullshit and should be reversed immediately.
Another thing that realy screwed it up was transferability. IP should only be expressable by the author period.

But without IP at all we would have a lot less culture. People would just not be able to produce enough of it and survive.

So while the intention was good and it functioned well for many years some rich groups or people screwed it up over the years and now we have shit laws peddled mainly by the US.

Well, the protection was there before the phrase "intellectual property" was ever invented. Then it was just a guarantee of a monopoly of the rights to use in exchange for promoting creativity. Though culture was doing pretty well (and possibly even better) before such laws were enacted.

IP is a broad word and cannot be said to be 'invented' at any one time. It is a collection of laws that deal with different specific situations.
The older laws can just as easily be called IP rights.
Before these laws there was no protection.
But then again, culture was not as fruitfull as it is now. Most people were peasants that never got to deal with these issues.
Culture was doing well for the few rich people that could afford it.
Because of the spread of literacy culture started to spread quicker and more people got involved in conflicts about ownership of ideas etc.
So laws were necessary to resolve these conflicts.
The problems we have now come mostly from big firms abusing their position. But that doesn't make IP laws useless, it means the current implementation sucks.

IP is a broad word and cannot be said to be 'invented' at any one time. It is a collection of laws that deal with different specific situations.
The older laws can just as easily be called IP rights.
Before these laws there was no protection.
But then again, culture was not as fruitfull as it is now. Most people were peasants that never got to deal with these issues.
Culture was doing well for the few rich people that could afford it.
Because of the spread of literacy culture started to spread quicker and more people got involved in conflicts about ownership of ideas etc.
So laws were necessary to resolve these conflicts.
The problems we have now come mostly from big firms abusing their position. But that doesn't make IP laws useless, it means the current implementation sucks.

[/quote]

Maybe. All I'm saying is that the phrase "intellectual property" itself was chosen to pre-bias any discussion in a certain way. We can discuss the legitimacy of me copying something that you have done or created but when it's "intellectual property", then suddenly it's a different ball game.

I think I haven't explained myself clearly. I'm not trying to say bitcoins and mp3s are IP, or that IP is good, or IP is bad or anything similar. Here's what I'm trying to do:

I'm hypothesizing a [libertarian] society where there is no such thing as IP and I'm asking a question about that society. Now, in this society, it is not permitted to regulate any persons use of their private property, as long as they does not infringe on anyone else's property rights and do not violate the NonAggressionPrinciple (NAP). Read the IP thread I linked to in the OP for more details.

Thus, in this society, duplicating an mp3 cannot be outlawed - no property has been damaged or stolen, and no aggression has occurred.

In these circumstances, therefore, could there be any rational justification for outlawing the copying of a bitcoin private key?  The BPK is not property, and no aggression has taken place.

Just to make it clear, I have an anti-libertarian inclination (though I keep an open mind), and I'm trying to present libertarians with a difficult question. In short: "In your libertarian world, how can you abolish IP and still claim a loss if your bitcoins are stolen? Therefore: get ye gone and sully the bitcoin world no more with your libertarian trash."  Ta-da!   :D


Assuming you are actually referring to the anti-IPR society, how is it fraud to copy a number, and execute mathematical functions on it? What exactly have I defrauded you of if I copy they keys in your possession, and transfer the associated bitcoins to a key in my possession.

I didn't. I said: "...bitcoin private keys cannot ever be considered physical property. If they are to be considered property at all, it can only be as intellectual property - like an mp3..."
I didn't say because, I said like.

And remember, I was referring to this hypothetical anti-IPR society.

I don't think libertarian necessarily means anti IP.  A brief Google search leads me to believe opinions on this are all over the map.  I believe in IP (just not as presently implemented in the US, particularly am not a fan of the status quo patent system).

I also think private keys have nothing to do with IP.  A private key, being a random number, is not IP.  The presence or absence of laws regarding IP in this hypothetical society would matter as much as the presence or absence of laws regarding oranges.

In the same hypothetical libertarian society that has no IP laws, credit card fraud would still be outlawed because it violates the property rights of others.  It is not the act of copying the credit card number that constitutes the fraud (I might have it legitimately, as a merchant for example), but the act of falsely representing the cardholder's intent by presenting a transaction against his account, the number being just a vehicle to make that misrepresentation.  It is the same whether I make that misrepresentation in person, or if I do it online with the use of a software program (in this case a web browser) that allows me to communicate and express my intent.  I see no reason why Bitcoin fraud would be any different.

Aah, interesting.

But you'll have to ask yourself what use there would be for bitcoin in a society without property.
Why would anyone even produce food if it got taken away because they didn't own it?
Such a society simply cannot exist.

(a) Yes. (b) Me too (agreed).

Yes, I agree.

I can agree with all this, except the very last sentence. See this quote from the thread about legal research I cited in OP (which, however, refers to our current world, not the imaginary anti-IPR world) (emphasis original):
If you think bitcoin fraud is similar to credit card fraud, then why couldn't I claim the same thing for mp3 fraud? However, since you are in favor of IP, you're probably the wrong person to ask.


There is property in this society. Just not intellectual property.

First, you might need to define mp3 fraud.  I have no idea what that means.


Changing credit card to Bitcoin makes sense:  Bitcoin fraud is a wide-ranging term for theft and fraud committed using Bitcoin or any related mechanism as a fraudulent source of funds in a transaction. The purpose may be to obtain goods without paying, or to obtain unauthorized funds from an account.    (Of course, since Bitcoin is also a unit of account, not just a payment method, the term "Bitcoin fraud" might properly be defined to also include any kind of fraud that involves attempts to take someone's Bitcoins.)

If I try to say: MP3 fraud is a wide-ranging term for theft and fraud committed using an MP3 file or any similar audio file as a fraudulent source of funds in a transaction. The purpose may be to obtain goods without paying, or to obtain unauthorized funds from an account.   ... the statement no longer makes sense.

Ok, but then the situation becomes that you cannot have IP laws for bitcoin because you don't allow IP laws.
Then if bitcoin is important enough to society we will invent some law that will address cryptocurreny directly.
For one, information needs a physical medium to be contained and you can make the private key more physical so that normal property laws apply.
If you want to stay within the digital domain then you could define a virtual container and you could say that everything inside the container is your property.

I think we are at the beginning of a new time where law will have to consider virtual property besides real property and intelectual property.
All three call for a different approach.

A computer is physical property. Hacking is trespassing on that physical property.

Or one can look at it another way. If I transfer Bitcoins from an address you control to an address I control, without your consent, I have stolen from you. You no longer have control of those Bitcoins. You have lost something, suffered damages. Once loss - damages - have been established, any libertarian anywhere will support your retrieval of that loss. No IP laws are needed.

IP laws protect from "loss" of something that cannot be lost: a copy of some data or other. Bitcoins are not just data, they are data which is verifiably under only one person's control at a time. They hold monetary value. The ones and zeroes which make up your bank account information are likewise data which is verifiably under your control, and if I transfer the balance from an account you control to an account I control, without your consent, I have likewise stolen from you. Bitcoins are no different than an electronic bank account balance.

i read the title of this thread and thought about knocking my head against a brick wall wondering why anyone would use interlectual property laws when they never invented the blockchain or the white paper concept of bitcoin.

unless you personally thought up and invented the blockchain/private key we today call bitcoin.. its not your intellectual property. you just have a free licence to use it.

ok now thats covered the legalities in simple terms. lets get to the use of bitcoin technology and how we can protect what we have.

you cannot claim intellectual property privileges/rights of bitcoin as its not your intellect.. your brain fart didnt make bitcoin (as a whole) exist. The bitcoin technology belongs to the guys that made the white paper about the bitcoin concept and they have allowed free user licence along the same terms of open source linux

however you can claim ownership of assets manufactured from someone elses intellectual property.

EG satoshi owns a gold mine(bitcoin code) and allows anyone in the world to mine on his land(blockchain).. and they can keep what they find. (hope u understand the analogy). You dont own the land. But you do own the gold you get and you have a licence to access the land.

your private key is your licence and just like your driving licence, it's an identification to give you access to the land, an identification to go to the bank to cash in or out your gold.

your private key is not deemed as your intellectual property, your private key is your 'identity' and your coins are your asset.

so if looking for legal protection, identity theft and asset/property theft are what you should be looking into.. not intellectual property but standard property..

if i was to for instance, guess your password to your FIAT online bank account and empty your savings. you would not be trying to get me arrested for intellectual property theft. it would be identity theft and theft of assets.

same goes for hacking your forum username and requesting coins from strangers on here to scam them.. you wont try getting me arrested for intellectual property theft because you own your username. you would get me arrested for identity theft and fraud.

same goes for cloning your driving licence and walking into your bank asking(in your name) to empty out the gold in your safety deposit box.

yes you have in your wallet your driving licence and you deem it as yours.. but its not your INTELLECTUAL property.. it belongs to the DMV in the US or the DVLA in the UK. that ID card is not INTELLECTUALLY yours, but it is your property in terms of goods/products/property/bricks and mortar.

so drop the topic about intellectual property, as its meaningless as a legal bitcoin protection. (unless your satoshi)

Exactly the same as if you walk into my bank with a false beard and pretend to be me and transfer funds into your bank account. You have deprived me of a stored sum of wealth without my permission.

And Casacius is right, most of the libertarians I converse with, even the more strident ones are still in favor of IP laws. Personally, I think they haven't thought the non-aggression principle through sufficiently but there you go. Personally, I'm not completely against the existence of such laws but think that the waters have been muddied way too much by those who claim to represent the content producers.

I think I see what you are trying to get at but I think you need to think about things a little more deeply because you're conflating two different but not dissimilar concepts..

This argument, and several others similar to it, are predicated on the idea that bitcoins (a) exist, and (b) are property. Bitcoins, per se, do not exist. They are not physical objects you could stake a claim to, or even contracts granting you a claim to property, like your contract with your bank.

What does exist are entries in a distributed database in the form of "A transaction signed with the private key matching this address can transfer exactly X bitcoins to another address of their choice." However, this database exists only by consensus. There is no contract. If the other participants in the bitcoin system fail to recognize your signed transactions, or rewrite the ledger such that the balance is associated with some other key you don't control, that is just too bad for you.

You are completely reliant on others choosing to follow the established bitcoin protocol--and the protocol does not have any regard for ownership in the sense you refer to, only possession of the associated private keys. Use of a key to sign a transaction is only proof of possession, which is true (and thus not fraud), however you came by the key. Any claim you might make against someone misusing your private key would have to be based on the principle that acquiring the key in the first place involved a violation of your rights to the physical property in which the key was stored.

Fiat currency is based on essentially the exact same concepts. Moreso the fiat currency residing in a bank balance. Both are digital information that has monetary value by consensus. Either way, if I transfer that digital information from one place to another without your consent, I have stolen from you, whether that theft is denominated in dollars or in Bitcoins. What's been stolen is not the information, but the monetary value it represents.

No, with traditional fiat currencies what is stolen is the physical notes, or contractual claims to the physical notes. The bank balance you refer to is a contractual claim against the bank for a specific amount of fiat currency. If someone shows up at a bank claiming to be you, and withdraws currency from your account or transfers it to a different account, they are committing fraud against the bank. (This is important: the fraud is against the bank, not you, though your contract with the bank may attempt to make you responsible for it.) They are claiming that the bank has an obligation which it does not, in fact, have. Their contract is with you, not the one impersonating you. Using fraudulent claims to trick the bank into giving you currency they do not owe you is theft; you're taking currency which still legitimately belongs to the bank. With bitcoins, there is no property and no contract, only a consensus-based accounting protocol.

What is stolen is always property, not "the monetary value it represents". The value of the property is only relevant when determining damages--but for there to be damages, property must first have been stolen.

You seem to be arguing against valuing Bitcoins themselves, not just against considering a loss of them a theft. Yes, Bitcoins are not even a digital "thing", they are defined only by transactions. They are an abstraction of value, just like fiat currency.

If a network error transfers the coins away, then those coins have not been "stolen". Stolen coins are transferred away by someone entering a transaction using a private key they acquired through illicit means, just as if someone somehow acquired your login credentials to your bank and sent all your digital fiat currency to another account with another bank.

But if someone makes a transaction from a private key that you control to one you do not control, you have lost the value of the Bitcoins represented by that transaction. Damages are always denominated in value, not in contracts or objects. Since you have lost value, it doesn't matter what currency that value is denominated in. I could run a quick conversion and say "He stole 4 grams of gold worth of Bitcoins!" and the value lost would still be the same.

Whenever something is stolen, it's the value, and not the Bitcoins, or the gold or the Dollars, or even the TV or car, that has been stolen, and that needs to be returned. Now, ideally, that value is returned in the same manner in which it was taken, but that's not often the case. If your car gets stolen, the insurance agency doesn't send you a new car. They send you a check for the value of the car.

The 'victim' would have to establish that the bitcoins were his. Since both parties have the private key, there is no way to establish that, unless you institute a single central incorruptible authoritative registry of bitcoin keys and their owners.

I'm not so sure. Suppose I create an mp3 and I sell copies in order to buy bread. If you sell it, then that would constitute a fraudulent source of funds for you. Of course, you could just give away copies for free. But then, someone could steal my bitcoins and give them away for free too, in which case the second receiver would be free to do as he pleases.

If the data is copied, the 'owner' still has the original, therefore there is no theft - nothing has been lost. The rest, executing instructions and mathematical functions on a computer, is not a violation of NAP. See this post below from the thread I cited before; it's the second post in that thread and is quite representative of many who contributed there (boldface mine):



nybble41 has already answered this above - I cannot instruct your computer to do anything it is not already programmed to do. Refusing me permission to interact freely with my computer would be a violation of the NAP.

nybble41 replied to this much better than me.

The thread I quoted seems to suggest otherwise. But I accept your statement. This is precisely why I started this thread talking about anti-IPR - I wanted to avoid generalizing to libertarianism and risk getting it wrong.

Can you explain a bit more? It would be great if someone holdings NghtRppr's (of the quote above) views would contribute here because I really feel that copying and using an mp3 is very similar to copying and using a bitcoin private key. Or, alternatively, you'd need an arbitrary law like "numbers that make up an mp3 are not protected, but numbers that make up a BPK are protected".

Whaaaa?

If I hold a knife to your mother's throat and instruct her to do something she manifestly knows how to do - proven by the fact of your existence - does that make her refusal to acquiesce to my raping her a violation of the NAP?

If I have a fence around my yard and you climb it, does that make my kicking you off my lawn a violation of the NAP?

Refusing trespass is not a violation of the NAP, nor is defending oneself. I'm not refusing you permission to interact freely with your computer. I'm refusing you permission to interact freely with mine.

Holding a knife to someone's throat would already be a violation of the NAP, I presume. Likewise entering someone's property.

So either switch yours off, or disconnect it (from me), or secure it.  But even still, let's separate the hacker who gains access to your computer, from the criminal mastermind, who eventually obtains your bitcoin keys and the associated bitcoins. What is your argument now to regain the bitcoins?  Let me quote nybble41's post (boldface mine):

Though I must add that the contracts argument, though admirable, couldn't ever be effective - it's not working in today's regulated world, never mind a libertarian world. How could you ever enforce that all internet users the world over have a contract with ISP's, upstream providers, and backbone providers, which prohibits hacking - and that such contracts will all be enforced? And then, suppose someone hacks the ISP and gains "illegitimate" access to the internet? Back to square one. I'm sure nybble41 was aware of this though and was merely pointing out the futility of relying on contracts to eliminate hacking.

The zeitgeist is definitely coming around on this, however, as Stephan Kinsella notably wrote in The Death Throes of Pro-IP Libertarianism (http://mises.org/daily/4601).

In my own experience, rejecting the legitimacy of imaginary property becomes straightforward for most libertarian-minded folk as soon as they check their premises and learn just the following brief background:

1. Despite popular myth and misconception, copyright did not, in fact, come about as some noble effort to protect the rights of authors, but rather has its ignoble origin in the privatization of censorship in post-Gutenberg sixteenth-century England. Its further developments have been by and for the distributors, as is evident even today with the major media companies seeking, and obtaining, what amount to perpetual extensions to their copyright terms.

Karl Fogel's essay The Surprising History of Copyright and The Promise of a Post-Copyright World (http://questioncopyright.org/promise) and Rick Falkvinge's History of Copyright (http://falkvinge.net/2011/02/01/history-of-copyright-part-1-black-death/) blog series are good summaries for brushing up on the history.

2. As Cory Doctorow pointed out in his recent talk The Coming Civil War over General-Purpose Computing (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbYXBJOFgeI), the very moniker "intellectual property" is a neologism. Before the 1970s, this discussion would have been about "creative monopolies". The smartest thing the distribution industry ever did was reframe the debate in their favor, as it's clearly a lot easier to go hat in hand (and pocketbook at the ready) to Congress if you're just requesting stronger protections for your "property rights" instead of begging that they please extend your already-considerable monopoly privileges.

Peter Saint-Andre's essay Who's Afraid of the Public Domain? (http://stpeter.im/writings/essays/publicdomain.html) makes much the same point, and Tucker and Kinsella have written voluminously on it as well. Once you realize that IP isn't about actual property rights (in the libertarian sense) at all, but rather just state-granted, limited-time monopoly privileges, the rest is easy: intellectual works aren't property any more than copyright infringement is theft, all the "you wouldn't steal a car" (http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/you-wouldnt-steal-a-car) propaganda trailers on DVDs notwithstanding.

And once the discussion is properly framed on monopoly privileges instead of property rights, well, for libertarians there isn't much left to debate. As Saint-Andre puts it:

Exactly. Entering someone's property. Like their computer. As I said before, hacking is trespass.


If you acquire stolen goods, it doesn't make them not stolen if you're not the one that stole them. If you somehow decode my private key without entering my computer, that's (pretty much literally) Force majeure (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force_majeure). Nothing I or anyone else could have done to stop you. But if you, or your agent, enters my computer system and operates it against my will, and gets my private key that way, You've at minimum committed criminal trespass, same as climbing a fence to peer into my window. It doesn't matter if my password is "biscuits" or if the fence you have to climb over is only a foot tall. It's still an intended barrier, and bypassing it is still trespassing.

As for actually recovering the bitcoins, I don't know of a way, short of threatening - or using - torture, of forcing you to return them, but as for any other crime, once the perpetrator is identified, it's up to the justice system.

The difference, obviously, is that while they may both be "abstractions of value", the fiat currency is also physical property, while the bitcoins are not. Wrongfully taking possession of physical fiat currency you don't own is theft. Claiming that someone else has a contractual obligation to give you that property, in the basis of a false identity, is fraud. You can't take possession of bitcoins, as they have no physical presence, and the rules of the bitcoin system don't require you to make any claims regarding your identity to move bitcoins around, only proof that you possess the correct key, so there is no fraud involved.


First, you're the only one talking about network errors. I was referring to deliberate action. If a majority of bitcoin miners were to get together and chose to rewrite the protocol to exclude your transactions, or to accept transfers from your accounts which are not signed with your key, you would have no legitimate claim against them. Bitcoin is based on consensus, not property rights. (That isn't meant to disparage bitcoin--in many ways, its consensus-based system is more secure than property rights which must be defended with force.)

Second, someone who impersonates you and tricks the bank into transferring your balance to a different account has not stolen from you, but rather from the bank. They had no authority to request that transfer, ergo (once the fraud has been uncovered) your balance should be unchanged. No third party has the authority to alter your contract with the bank. The fraud, and its consequences, are legitimately between the thief and the bank.

Finally, the analogy between bitcoin balances and bank accounts is false. Your bank account balance represents a contract between you and the bank. A bitcoin balance is just an entry in a ledger; there is no contract. There isn't even an organization to contract with. If the bank decreases your balance without your consent, they're in breach of their contract with you. If the consensus within the bitcoin system is that a transaction spending "your" balance is valid, however, that's the final word on the subject, no matter who generated the transaction.


Now this is just nonsense. First and foremost, value is subjective, ergo "denominated in value" is a meaningless phrase. What you mean, I presume, is "denominated in currency", which is an artifact of the concept of "legal tender", the idea that the government can force you to accept their currency as alternative payment despite the fact that what you're really owed is the property which was taken. Second, a loss of value is not sufficient, by itself, to give you a claim for compensation. The most obvious counter-argument here is competition: others who compete with you reduce the value of your property, by increasing the supply, but that doesn't mean your property rights have been infringed. Your rights cover the property itself, not its value. When something is stolen, it's the stolen property which the thief has an obligation to return, not its value--though the harmed owner may be willing to settle for something of equivalent value to them when the return of the original property is out of reach.


This is completely irrelevant, as the insurance agency didn't steal your car. Your contract with the insurer obligates them to compensate you for the loss with a specific amount of currency in exchange for your premium payments. The contract could just as easily have specified compensation in the form of a new car, if that was what you and the insurer agreed to, but cash is more flexible for both parties. In any case, the thief still owes you your car back--not the value of the car, or even an equivalent car: the car itself. It never stopped being your property just because you lost possession of it.

I'll concede the point that bitcoins are not, as such, "property", since they have no physical presence. Which is why my argument hinges on value. I did indeed mean "Denominated in value", as damages are always given in terms of some unit of monetary worth, ie a value. The reason we are having such great difficulty here is that no system for the transmission of value remotely like bitcoin has ever been devised or used before. The closest analogy is digital account balances with a bank.

In that analogy, the bank is not the network. The bank is your own computer, or whatever device you use to store and secure your private keys. (Which, in the case of a paper wallet in a safety deposit box, may indeed be a bank.) Unlawful entry into that device and retrieval of the private key is the crime, the lost bitcoins are the value of that crime - both to the criminal, and as a loss to you.

Now, particularly with Bitcoins, but also in most monetary theft, the return of the specific units of monetary exchange that were stolen is not important. If you're mugged for $50, I doubt you're going to check the serial numbers to make sure it was the same $50 that you got back. All you care about is the value that you have lost. In bank robberies, the police might use the serial numbers to verify that that is indeed the stolen money, not to see that the bank gets that specific money back, but to prove that the person in possession of it is the criminal. If some of it has been spent, they're not going to demand it back from the merchants, they're going to extract it from the thief - probably by selling whatever it was he bought with it, if possible. Again, the specific property is not important, it's the value of that property that's important.


The contract states that the insurer has an obligation to make you whole. That's a phrase with a specific legal meaning: "to pay or award damages sufficient to put the party who was damaged back into the position he/she would have been without the fault of another." Past that point, the insurer's obligation to you is ended. As is the thief's. You have been made whole. You have received the value of the stolen car back. At that point, if the thief owes anyone anything, it's the insurer, not you, since without their theft of your car, that claim would not have been made, and neither would the payout.

It boils down to this: Following your logic, stealing bitcoins is not a crime. Following mine, it is. Since I feel you would be justifiably upset if I were to steal your bitcoins, and would consider me a criminal, it is clear that your logic fails the simplest test of real-world application. Unless you wouldn't? In which case, I have a program I'd like you to download...

What you say is true. But cash is just paper with pictures of dead white dudes on it. And even if (for example) the US government decides it has the authority to recognise them as something more, if you have $500k of Swiss Franks in your safe and they are stolen, should the US government refuse to act because it's not their currency?

You're wandering into very philosophical deconstructions where most things that we accept as real just stop making sense. It's probably not a very fruitful path and best kept for being drunk with friends (and I mean that in a good way).

By this flawed definition, stealing electricity should be OK too, because it doesn't "exist" and therefore isn't "property".  But most places would consider it theft if you consumed it in any significant quantity without paying (by this, I mean bypassing the electric meter so you can run miners without the kWh costs for example, or running an extension cord to your neighbor's house.  I do not mean things with negligible costs like charging your cell phone away from home).

Unfortunately for your argument, "loss of value" is not a justification for use of force. Loss of property is.


Which, as I already pointed out, is about as far as you can possibly get from a useful analogy, but whatever.


"Entry into that device"--another bad analogy, this time based on the mythology of cyberspace. Hackers don't "enter" other people's computers, they send messages addressed to them, which those computers are (deliberately or otherwise) programmed to respond to in fixed ways. Applying reasoning based on trespass to "computer crimes" is a dubious practice, at best.

Assuming, however, that there is some legitimate basis for the reasoning that giving orders to your computer without your consent represents an infringement of your rights to your computer, then I agree that this would be the actual crime, and that you could claim damages based on all its consequences, including the financial value of the bitcoins lost to you through misuse of your private key.


That's true enough for fungible property, like currency, but it's only a matter of convention and convenience. For less fungible property, like a car, or an heirloom with mostly emotional value to the owner, it's obviously not acceptable to simply substitute a facsimile of similar market value. Your property right is not simply for "an object like this", but rather "this object". In some cases it's easy to convince the owner to settle for a close substitute, but they are under no obligation to do so.


I don't know where you get your insurance, but all of my policies have specific limits on the amount payed out, which may or may not equal the estimated value of the item being insured. The insurer is not taking on any open-ended obligation to "make me whole", and I am not forfeiting my rights to the stolen property by accepting compensation from my insurer for its loss.


The thief has a different obligation--that of returning the stolen property to its rightful owner. This is where the concept of "making whole" applies. The thief is not absolved of the crime simple because I have an insurance policy which covers the theft.


The only reason the thief would owe the insurer anything is if my contract with the insurer required me to give them the rights to the stolen property in exchange for the insurance payout. That is a reasonable step, but it's not automatic. Without a specific clause in the insurance contract transferring the property rights, it would be perfectly reasonable to accept the insurance payout and still claim the rights to the stolen property.

Remember, I payed for that insurance. The payout is coming out of my premiums, and those of my fellow insurees. Saying that the insurance payout can "make me whole" is equivalent to saying that I can "make myself whole".


I might be upset, mostly at myself for failing to secure my private key, but I wouldn't consider you a criminal solely on the basis of losing control over my bitcoins. Force would not be justified. Of course, by the same token, I am free to respond in kind.


You seem to have misunderstood what I said. It doesn't matter that the Swiss Franks aren't U.S. government currency; what matters is that they are physical property. They may only be bits of paper with pictures, but they're still your bits of paper, just as if it has been bars of gold or important legal documents or an unpublished manuscript in that safe instead of Swiss Franks.

Bitcoins, on the other hand, don't exist. You can't possess them, and they aren't property. Your bitcoin balance is just a number in other people's computers, one which they are in no way obligated to recognize. In many ways it's a lot like a reputation. You don't have a property right to your bitcoin balance any more than you have a property right to the way other people think about you.


Obviously, whether "most places" consider it theft has no bearing on whether it actually is theft. However, this is worth analyzing. I wouldn't consider the electricity itself (the electrons and/or electric field) to be property. However, the electric meter itself, and the supply side of the power lines, are certainly the property of the utility company, so connecting to them without the company's permissions would be a violation of their property rights. A similar argument applies for running a power cable to your neighbor's house. Having infringed their property rights, you would be liable for the full cost of the consequences.

Well, there you go. We finally agree. Thank you.

Now, you seem to have a problem with considering a hacking the equivalent of trespassing. Well, it is. Hackers don't say "I'm talking to your computer", they say, "I'm in your computer" Trojans aren't called "surreptitious communications channels," they're called "back doors." From both sides of the fence, the perception is that cyberspace is at least a useful abstraction, and that someone who has gained illicit access to your computer is trespassing. Since that allows the only logical path for prosecution of digital theft of Bitcoins, I tend to agree.

OK, not a completely valid analogy but you can bet the crime will be prosecuted somewhat differently than if someone stole a box of printer paper.

I guess what it comes down to is that the concept of property and ownership, other than what you are holding in your hand, rely on societal conventions. If you leave your house, it's not OK for squatters to move in. If you park your car on the street, it's not OK for someone to just help themselves, even if you leave the keys in and the engine running. And if you have a store of value and someone reassigns that value to themselves without your permission, that's not OK either. This is why the big media companies are pushing the whole "intellectual property" thing so heavily. They want to get away from a temporary monopoly granted by the government and towards actual ownership of information.

If you want to go your way with the contract/fraud thing, by joining the mining network, are miners not contracting with bitcoin users to authenticate and validate their transactions (particularly where transaction fees apply)? This is who the fraudster would be defrauding in your scenario. Take that where you will...

I find it hard to believe that you're actually advocating legislation-by-analogy. Analogies are bad enough when they show up in normal arguments, since they're always false to some degree. Using them as the basis for legislation, as justification for the use of force, is even worse. An analogy can provide a useful mental image, to illustrate an argument, but you have to keep in mind that the image is deceptive--and analogies involving computers and "cyberspace" are more deceptive than most, because the underlying realities are so much more complex.

The "trespass", if there was any, is not because the hacker "entered" your computer, but rather because they caused it (by whatever means) to do something you didn't want it to do. It's a tenuous argument, however, because they can't really make your computer do anything. The computer is only reacting to eternal stimuli according to its programming. Even if you didn't intend that specific result, you are responsible for your own property, and you chose to hook it up to a communications system capable of receiving messages from anywhere in the world. Ensuring that your computer operates securely regardless of which messages it might receive is mostly your problem. Or, to flip that around, are you seriously going to claim that sending a message addressed to your computer which it happens to process in a manner you did not intend is equivalent to the use of force?


Property is more than a social convention. The law exists to uphold property rights, not to define them. Property rights are an artifact of scarcity, which is to say, the nature of the universe, and human nature. I recommend reading Bastiat for a full treatment of this subject.


The government can pervert the law to enforce their monopoly, and even make that monopoly permanent rather than temporary, but it can't grant them "ownership" of information, because whatever the law might try to claim, information is not property. It lacks the critical qualification of scarcity. In any case, ownership isn't about exclusive control, it's about having the right to use the property. Copyright and the like turn the concept of property on its head, attempting to enforce exclusive control over non-scarce information at the expense of denying others the right to use their rightful property.

The phrase "store of value" refers to another false analogy. It invokes images of possessing value, of staking a property claim to it. But value isn't something you can possess. You can only possess property which is expected to remain valuable. That value fluctuates, since it's not a physical aspect of the property, but rather a result of people's thoughts and preferences. It can change in an instant. Gold, for example, is widely considered a "store of value", and is obviously property, but if someone were to invent, say, a cheap way of extracting gold from seawater, the value of your gold would evaporate overnight, and you would have no claim against the inventor for that loss of value. You still have the gold itself, which is all you ever had a right to.


What contract would that be? Anyone can join the mining network. You don't even need to identify yourself, much less sign a contract. If someone wanted to start mining blocks, but follow a different set of rules, I don't see anything that would give anyone using the blockchain a legitimate claim against them. Of course, no one else needs to accept their blocks as valid, either, but if enough people got together and agreed on a set of changes to the rules, however arbitrary or discriminatory they might be, those who dissented and kept to the original rules still have no justification for forcing anyone to stick with their branch of the blockchain, or to compensate them for the lost market value of the bitcoin balances stranded on an unpopular fork.

I see a lot of sophistry but I still haven't seen a good reason why someone forging a bitcoin transaction would not be legitimately illegal even in a fairly strong Libertarian system and I still don't see that intellectual property isn't an orthogonal issue.

Every time someone comes up with a counter, you jump to something else. Not intellectual property? It's non-agression. Not non-agression? It's scarcity... I feel like I'm on a wild goose chase. I give up. Honestly. To prove it, just send me your private key and I'll transfer all your bitcoins to my account.

Maliciously crafting a message to send to a computer to force it to act in a way the owner does not intend is, yes.

The universe can be said to exist only in terms of specific information.
So everything physical can be seen as just information.
And a thing like a private key is a unique piece of information.
It is maximally scarce since there is only one example of it.
Sure, the nature of information makes it easy to copy, but physical opbjects can be copied too, atom by atom if nessesary. So the problem remains.

A message can't "force" the computer to do anything. The computer only follows its instructions, and the instructions in effect at the time the message is received are those the owner put there.

Anyway, to try to steer this conversation back on-topic, the original question was whether private keys are a form of "IP"--specifically, whether you could claim copyright infringement against someone else for possessing an unauthorized copy of your key. It looks like we're all agreed that private keys are not covered by copyright, being random numbers with no creative aspect, so that argument won't work, regardless of whether "IP" is a meaningful concept. Does anyone disagree?

Right, so if the lock to your house has a flaw that alows anyone to open it by operating it in a certain way it gives anyone the right to enter your house.
"I'm sorry, your honor, but i didn't break in, the lock simply allowed me to unlock it and there was nothing else to prevent me from entering. The house simply complied with my attemts to unlock it and so i had the right to enter."

I don't think you understand how hacking works. In most cases a flaw in one or another software package allows data in the message (which should always be treated as data, never instructions) to be run as instructions. This is known as a remote code execution or arbitrary code execution (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbitrary_code_execution) bug. The hacker then maliciously crafts a message which includes the instructions that he wants to run on your machine at the appropriate location in the data. When you receive this message, your computer runs those instructions, and the hacker gains access to your computer.

So, no. The owner didn't put those instructions there. The hacker did. And that is equivalent, at minimum, to trespass.

Ask any anti-IPR if copying an mp3 is a crime. Then ask any Hollywood producer. What you, or I, "think", is irrelevant. The point of a legal system is to reduce conflict and have a fair method of resolving any residual conflict not already covered by the "law".

I, at least, agree with this. The next question is whether private keys can be considered "property" at all - given the nature of the bitcoin network, all that matters is possession.  Let's move, then, from an anti-IPR world to an anti-VP "anti-Virtual-Property" world, where it is not possible to define non-physical objects as property - specifically, in this case, data (such as an mp3, or a private key).

First of all, it is not possible to *forge* a bitcoin transaction.

Second, even if I agree that hacking a computer is equivalent to trespass, then you would have to show me which property I trespassed upon. The hard disc? Looks just the same to me, no damage done. The CPU? No damage there either. Really - I'm not *touching* your property, only mine - my keyboard, my mouse. All you can say is that the *data* on your computer (the privkey) has been interfered with (copied), and if you want your data to be legally protected from copying, then I fail to see why an mp3 cannot be also legally protected from copying.  I get the difference that, to copy an mp3, you don't need to hack Lady Gaga's computer, or her publisher's. But, even if we allow for the trespass argument, all I need is for your privkeys to "somehow" find their way to my computer and I can fully legally, without any possible accusation of trespass transact the BTCs to myself.

Insurance companies often won't pay a claim if it can be shown that the claimant did not take reasonable steps to secure the property. So, if you leave your door open, to use the argument above, then it's still illegal to enter and steal BUT tough luck, the insurance company won't pay up. Therefore, if your computer is not adequately programmed to protect against hacking, then you would be responsible for the loss.

And even the "arbitrary code execution" is still just avoiding the point - if you want *your* computer secure, then *you* should make sure there are no bugs which would permit arbitrary code execution.

**EDIT: Most of the people contributing here seem to agree that private keys should be somehow legally protected. My intention is not to say that they shouldn't be protected, but to see what "purist" libertarians think, by which I mean libertarians who declare that data (such as an mp3) cannot be declared as property of any sort but, being on this forum and liking bitcoins, think that private keys *should* somehow be declared as property.  To make it clear, I link again to NghtRppr's post (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=38854.msg475662#msg475662). For the present argument, I might say: "Telling me what I can and cannot do with my computer is equivalent to claiming ownership of my computer, which amounts to little more than theft, hence a violation of NAP".

That's pretty close. I would say that you're using my property (the computer) without my permission, or even knowledge, which, while there is no damage done to that property, does result in a financial loss to me, the same as if you had picked the lock on my front door, and used the access to my house thus acquired to rifle through my financial records and gain access to my bank account information.

computer ~= house
privkey ~= banking records

In both cases, you're not substantially altering or damaging the property you're trespassing on. In both cases, you're there only for information, which, once you have a copy, you leave unaltered where you found it. In both cases, the financial loss only comes later, when you use the information thus acquired to pretend you're me and transfer away my funds. In both cases, the trespass is only the enabling crime which allows for the larger crime of the financial theft.

Trespass is not damaging property, it's accessing property against the owner's wishes. I'm not even saying that private keys are property, any more than your bank account information is property. It's data, but data which access to allows a considerable amount of mayhem. So, mere possession of my private key is not - itself -  a crime, but the means that was used to get it, and what is done with it, those might be crimes.

If I foolishly posted my private key down there in my sig, or nailed my banking records to my front door, then the end result of that is my own damn fault, and I'd have a hard time prosecuting you for using the data that is so freely available. On the other hand, if you had to trespass to get that data, then the data is clearly illicit, and what you do with it (such as steal my money) may further compound your crimes.

Just to say, I've lost interest in the private key aspect of this argument but I agree that the hacking of a computer is not the same as trespass. Though it does have some aspects in common, it is still a different thing.


You're missing a logical step in there somewhere.

What is the key difference?

Thanks for the vote of confidence, but I really do know how system breaking works. I'm a software engineer with a focus on real-time operating systems and device drivers, not a computer novice. I'm familiar with the techniques from a theoretical / defensive perspective, though I've never been inclined to put them into practice against someone else's system.

Your description of arbitrary code execution vulnerabilities is reasonably accurate. However, what you're overlooking is the fact that it is the software already on the computer which takes the data supplied by the hacker and reinterprets it as code. The code came from the hacker, but the software already on your computer ran it. This happens all the time without any harm or fault attached; most web pages include executable code that your computer downloads and runs, for example. Even bitcoin transactions include executable scripts. Most of the time the computer's owner is not even aware of the code. In many cases (e.g. ads and tracking code in web pages) it is even true that the owner would not approve of running the code if he or she was made aware of it.

The question is whether it is sufficient that the computer accepted the code and ran it, or if the owner must be expected to approve of running it given the choice. I would argue that when you own a machine that is designed to receive and process messages, and connect it to the Internet, it is your responsibility to make sure it processes them safely (or accept the consequences), even in the case of malformed or maliciously crafted messages. If that places an unacceptable burden on the participants, I've already suggested a system of contracts which would suffice to enforce some basic etiquette while remaining consistent with the natural rights of everyone involved.

Consider this: What we have here is basically a case where you have some information you don't want to give to anyone else. Forget the computers; if this was simply information in your head, and someone else, by asking the right questions, managed to get you to reveal it despite your attempts at concealment (by observing your involuntary body language, for example), that would not make them an aggressor. Like I said before, of course, all analogies are false to some extent, including this one. I'm not basing any conclusions on it. However, I think it makes a decent illustration.

Lack of physical presence.

A lock can still be bypassed without using a key. One does not blame the house owner for purchasing a lock with "vulnerabilities" that allow it to be picked, nor the manufacturer for producing it. One blames the man with the set of lock picks.


From the point of view of the processor, I am no more physically present than a hacker. A processor simply runs whatever instructions are presented to it, regardless of where it comes from.

Yes. I don't see your point.

That physical presence is not relevant to the computer. I no more have to be local to the processor to use it legitimately than does the hacker, to use it illicitly.

I understand your point (that physical presence is not relevant to computers, therefor hacking is not trespassing since you need to be physically present to trespass), which is essentially the same as mine (that physical presence is not relevant to computers, therefor hacking is trespassing since you do not need to be physically present to trespass), but the fact remains that the hacker is using your property without your permission, which is functionally identical to trespassing.

I don't agree with your definition of hacking. There are many ambiguous forms of hacking. A hacker could have gained access to the bootsector of the computer (again, through different means). Hacking is about getting some form of control, not about getting your code to run per se. You could be running code that was already there. You could not run code at all.

Why do you expect to be able to take responsibility of the stuff happening on your computer all the time?
Do you also think that if you own a car you are responsible for what someone else does with that car all the time?
Do you stand by your car all night to make sure noone steals it and commits a crime with it?

A modern pc does tens of billions of things per second. A mobile device not that much less.
Because of this speed we have no direct sight over it (even you).
I don't see most people inspecting every packet going in and out. They simply trust a tool or a service. They have to because otherwise everyone has to be a computer technician to protect their computer well. It's not practical given the nature of computers.
But then again, as a software developer you must know that it's incredibly hard to make something reasonably complex and bugfree. Bugs that lead to security issues can happen at multiple levels, from conceptual to implementation and everything inbetween.
The tools used for protection are flawed so how much responsibility can you realistically expect people to take?

So altho i agree that the owner of the device has some responsibility, this responsibility is shared with the manufacturer and society in general (laws and opinions).

And i'm not sure what you mean by your analogy.
If the person asking the questions does this with criminal intentions then it is certainly not legal.

It has in common that someone is using your stuff without you agreeing to it.
It's that simple.

It's not that physical presence is relevant to computers or not. Only that it is relevant to literal trespassing. If you're going to link the two, you'll need to use a qualifier like "virtual" or "effectively". Legally, it's not even close (though politicians could choose to make it so of course)

True. But that's not sufficient. If someone comes to the desk where you work and picks up your pen and writes down a phone number, that's not trespass.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trespass_to_chattels

So legally it is the case. At least by precedence in the jurisdiction of those courts. It's not clear from that snippet if they expanded trespass to include all personal items (cf pen example), whether it already applied to those items and they expanded it to include computers  or  if it only means computers and not other personal items or what.

I think it's also important to bear in mind Lincoln's famous quote about dogs and legs.

No, but that happens inside an office that is not owned by you.
If your pen happens to be in your house then that is tresspassing.
If the pen is a sequence of unique information living on your computer then that is tresspassing too.
And that is besides the point that this is also theft.

Yeah and i want to say that what i write here are mostly generalisations to make a point.
Even the simple case of a pen can lead to a whole essay... :)

It originally meant all personal items. Yes, even your pen example. Technically, that's trespass to chattels. It's also petty theft of ink. It's not worth prosecuting, because of the miniscule amount of financial loss, but it is, technically, a crime, even though most people wouldn't mind. Unless, of course, the pen is owned by the company, and for use of employees, in which case it's perfectly within the proper use of that pen.

In that case, I accept hacking as trespass to chattels.

Still, you are telling me that I may not type, on my own keyboard, something like (pseudocode): "copy from: myrkulsPC:/dirs/wallet.dat to: myPC:"  Do I own my property or not?


This is what I'm trying to get at. If you foolishly leave your records where an unscrupulous person can get them, then it's your own damn fault. What if you leave them on an old Win98 computer full of hackable bugs? Where does it cross the line? Let's try something else, suppose you leave your private keys written on your desk. And I look in the window with a pair of binoculars and write it down?  Now suppose your keys are in the same place, but covered by another sheet of paper. So I walk up to the (open) window and blow in - the sheet moves, and I copy the key. Is that ok? Is blowing in the window an act of trespass?

In any case, this thread seems to conclude that hacking is equivalent to trespass. This is something I would largely agree with, so I'm willing to leave it at that, particularly since no strong anti-IPR pro-bitcoin person rose to the occasion. However, I have to say that the forum's defence is only this: "it is not permitted to hack someone's computer to obtain a private key; anyone doing so should be fully responsible for the results of that act of trespass, including loss of value to the victim". This is not what I wanted to address in this thread, but I wanted to address whether the key itself is protected; not whether obtaining a copy of the key is some form of crime or not.

So, in alternative, let me hypothesize this. Suppose I can get a copy of your private key without trespassing?  E.g., your estranged and embittered wife/husband gives me a copy. It is now utterly unnecessary for me to interact at all with your property. May I now openly and legally transfer the associated bitcoins to my account or is use of the private key somehow protected?

I can see that if I pay a thief to steal your key, then I would be largely responsible. But suppose a thief steals your key on his own initiative, then tries to sell it to me? The thief is responsible for the trespass and "loss of value" to you. I would be merely copying a number from him and doing some stuff with that number, need I say, with only my computer.

You can type that all you want. If it actually does that, though, you're accessing my computer. That's the problem, not what you do with your computer, but what you do with mine.

Buying the key after the fact is effectively the same as commissioning the theft, so you're just as liable, there. Now... obtaining the key from a bitter spouse, that's a rough one. It would probably depend on how she got it.

Intent also plays into things. If you obtain a key and you don't know it was unlawfully obtained, that's different from if you knew that it was.

The issue also isn't ownership of the private key but what you do with it. Remember when credit cards were recorded by swiping with duplicate paper and there was no ccv code? Someone who you made a payment to "owned" all the information he needed to access your funds. It's only the misuse of it which breaks the law.

And wrt to the property argument, I own my gun. Is it therefore OK to start pointing it in arbitrary directions and pull the trigger? No? Is it not my own property to do with as I wish?

It is your property to use and consume as you wish, absolutely. However, there are limits to the actions you can take without infringing on others' property rights. These limitations have nothing to do with your own property rights, and in fact it doesn't matter whether your property is involved at all. Hitting someone over the head with someone else's brick is just as off-limits as shooting them with your own gun. It's your action and the impact to their property which matter. You have an absolute right to use your own property. You don't have any right to use theirs without their permission. Any action which would infringe on the property rights of multiple individuals requires the unanimous consent of all involved.

Precisely.