Bitcoin Forum

Is there an existing license on the block chain that puts it in the public domain?

Thanks.

License?  Mere collections of facts are not subject to copyright laws anywhere in the world that I'm aware of.

My understanding is that a database is protectable by copyright in the EU.  Also, if a collection of facts is a complication requiring creativity, it is copyrightable in the US.

I was just wondering if the developers already applied some legal protection for the "openness" of the block chain.  In the form of licensing, copyright, etc.

Thanks.

The genesis block is presumably BSD-licensed, as it is part of the code? I am not a lawyer.

Or at least, certain parts of it, such parts as are part of the code, are? I am still not a lawyer.

However that license does not protect it the way a GPL license would have. Still not a lawyer.

Was that deliberate foresight? Someone wanted to ensure they could sieze control of it back at some later date or something so deliberately avoided ensuring all derivative works are covered by the same license? I suppose I could consider being a plaintiff... (Bait and switch, maybe? or is BSD expressly designed to make bait-and-switch perfectly acceptable and the victim's fault for not fully comprehending the implications of the choice of license?)

-MarkM-

Good call.  The genesis block is in main.cpp as both a comment and a snippet of code.  So that much has an MIT/X11 license in source form.

So thats something.  I can't find anything else that assigns any protection to the .dat files though.

Thanks.

The blockchain is not a database. Relevance?

As a personal project, I'm trying to build a chain of legal precedence for using copyright law as a legal foundation for Bitcoin.  So I'm trying to understand the source, data, and application in that context.

This started from a thread in the Legal forum and led me to questions for the developers covering basic aspects of how everything is licensed or protected.  I understand that the source is MIT/X11, but I'm unsure what applies to the data.  Clearly they are public and you can copy them, but does anything specifically grant that right?

Where did Satoshi host the original blockchain downloads, if there were any?

For example, a stub chain that included the genesis block?

I ask because some commonly used sites require certain types of license for their free to use options.

Sourceforge, for example, if an author uploads there, at least as a free user, they would be in violation of terms if their upload was not covered by a license that falls into some range of what type of license it is, wouldn't they?

On the other hand possibly uploading copyright images you have permission to use alongside your free open source code might not actually require you to have those images open-sourced prior to uploading them.

So this is basically a grasping at straws attempt to seek author intent in author actions.

-MarkM-

Again, relevance? Why would it be desirable to assert copyright claims to the blockchain?

Think of physical experiment, like Galileo using rolling balls on a track to invalidate the Aristotelian theory of motion. Galileo could claim copyright to his notes recording the motions, but it'd be ridiculous to claim copyright on the actual movement of the rolling balls. That's what you're trying to do with “copyright of the blockchain.” If you build a database on top of the blockchain with associated metadata, that'd be different. Blockchain.info holds copyright to their database with receiving-time and forwarded-by information on transactions. But the blockchain is not a record of physical events, it is those events. It's not copyrightable.

The very question presupposes that a license is necessary.  How about we think about it from the other side.

Who could make some sort of claim to the blockchain?
What sort of claim could they make?

And the third question, what would a judge think about such a claim when it was revealed that the content of the claim was intentionally uploaded, by the claimant, to a network designed with the sole function of widely distributing such things?

Huh?  There were none.  The blockchain bootstraps itself from the genesis block and peers on the network.

You point is valid, data itself is not copyrightable.  That I understand.

I'm trying to eliminate a layer of ambiguity for the right to modify an intangible asset using current copyright law (in the U.S. and broken as the law may be).

In the model I'm trying to build, the private key is copyrighted by an individual.  The "performance" of that individuals work is modifying the block chain with an entry.  I believe it much easier to make this case if the property rights of the block chain are explicitly defined somewhere.

My goal is to establish that private key is a "right to spend" using copyright law.  Then I can defend the "right to spend" using the same law as a valuable property right regardless of the intangible nature of the assets it represents.

That's the relevance.

It's not necessary, it just makes the chain I'm building easier to establish.   (i.e. the "right to spend" is protected by copyright law and is a valuable right).

I think anyone could make a claim on the block chain if they filed it.  There is only one item I could find with the word Bitcoin that has a registered copyright and its an episode of The Good Wife Episode #313 by CBS "Bitcoin For Dummies".

They could claim authorship and first publication of collection of facts in a fixed tangible form that requires creativity to establish.  (The data and indexes on a DVD). Then start a class action lawsuit against anyone using Bitcoin they decided to name for wrongfully distributing their intellectual property.

I think the judge throws it out after years of churning through the court system.  Holding the legal status of the "right to spend" hostage for years.

I also believe that adding a provision to the software license can avoid this theoretical stupidity.  It just has to say that the data it outputs it committed to the public domain.

The problem with your scheme is that none of it is true.  The key is not copyrighted, nor copyrightable, and there is no performance, not at signing, nor when the transaction is broadcast, nor when the transaction is packed into a block.  On top of that, keyholders don't modify the block chain, miners do.  Oh, and there is no block chain.

By your logic, which is technically exact, Bitcoins are not property nor can they be property.  Which is the other side of the argument and I completely respect that.

I'm still interested in trying to establish property rights using existing precedence.  The miners are definitely a problem for my model so far.  I'll try and work your other points in.  Signing and broadcasting seem like a good candidate for "performance" as encrypted video broadcasts might provide precedence.

Not sure I understand "there is no block chain" tho.

Thanks for your input.

If you have a purse full of coins and a wallet stuffed with dollar bills, do you need to go through complicated copyright arguments to set precedence for ownership?

This is almost certainly flawed from the start.  Copyrights protect creative works.  A private key is a random number completely devoid of creativity.  It cannot be copyrighted.  See Feist Publications, Inc., v. Rural Telephone Service Co., 499 U.S. 340 (1991), though, I am not a lawyer.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_v._Rural (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_v._Rural)


I would be willing to bet that a private key is more likely to be considered possible evidence of a right to spend, but not a token of the right itself, just the same way a dollar bill represents a US dollar, but doesn't necessarily represent that the person holding it has a legal right to it.

If I break into your house and steal your fiat cash, some stock certificates, and private keys, do I acquire the right to spend your cash and bitcoins and sell your stocks?  With the cash, I don't necessarily acquire the right to spend it, even though I acquire the ability to spend it, and if I were to be caught having stolen and spent your cash or sold your stocks, I would be liable to you for depriving you of it and would likely owe you restitution.  The dollar changed hands, but the right to spend it did not.  If I'm not caught, then I become the owner of those only in a putative sense: I'm in possession, and since no one can prove otherwise, it's presumptively mine.  That's pretty different than receiving it legally.

So clearly, I don't acquire any legally sanctioned right to spend your fiat cash by stealing it.  I can think of no reason why the existing legal framework will suddenly be interested in treating Bitcoins any differently just because their ownership is proven technologically through numbers.

Tangible property has a long history of property rights.  So no you don't.

Intangible property has a short history and limited precedence to draw from.  Except possibly for copyright laws.

There is certainly a copyrightable aspect about the blockchain, as any non-trivial work is under copyright. IANAL, but here is my take.

First, a priori we know:

• Most blocks in the blockchain has a parent that it refers to and effectively incorporates by reference.
• The only block that lacks a parent block is the genesis block.
• The genesis block was originally licenced under the MIT licence:
  
  Quote
  Copyright © 2009–2012 Bitcoin Developers
  
  Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
  
  The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
  
  THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
  
• No block since the genesis block has any specific licence attached to it (thus far).

Legally, if a work does not include any licence, it remains copyrighted and cannot be copied without notice. The production of a block uses and copies, by reference, the genesis block, directly or indirectly. Additionally, the copyright notice, and the permission notice, are both implied through reference. Therefore, we are left with only the non-genesis blocks.

As the blocks produced by miners are not explicitly licensed, in theory, a miner retains the right to claim intellectual property over that block and all its derivatives. No sane miner would do this, as it effectively means that their blocks will be avoided in the future (and their income will be orphaned). The free market will attempt to build on blocks that have freer licences.

This problem could have been solved if the genesis block were licenced in a copyleft licence, which unfortunately is not the case. Luckily, the miners existing now are unlikely to sue subsequent miners for copyright infringement, nor relaying nodes for unauthorized distribution. However, this is clearly a problem and should be solved.

In conclusion, this loophole should be closed as soon as possible. Luckily, closing this loophole is as simple as explicitly licencing a block under a copyleft licence. One like this will do:


This does not apply, because blocks are creative works. A block is not simply a random number, but rather a number that meets rigid and difficult criteria. In this sense, a block is more comparable to a work of art: randomly generated pixels do not constitute art, but pixels generated in a manner that is appealing does.

I'm seeking to avoid the application of Feist by arguing that the use of software to create a unique expressible idea, then expressing it, is copyrightable.  Particularly if it is unique and original.

My gut tells me that ownership of the private key is the thing to protect.  I'm just not exactly sure how to get there.


Thanks for this.  My reasoning is that ownership can't even be established without property rights.   So even though the concept is easy to understand (I own Bitcoins), legally Bitcoins have no standing as property.  Not even intangible property because of how they work.  So I'm trying to put it on an intellectual property track and see how far I can take it.

I couldn't have said it any better.  I do believe that the software which manages the data can apply the license to data it manages under U.S. law as well.  Not sure how it works internationally.

I believe doing so will eliminate years of possibly legal stupidity if Bitcoin is ever challenged.

Except under a broad array of circumstances allowed under the law, including fair use.  When the totality of the circumstances is considered, copying that very brief piece of data was clearly intended by its author, and the presumption of an implicit license is quite plausible.


If this were true, then I could claim that my tire tracks as I drive on a dirt road are copyrighted, and then start asserting claims against Google for publishing pictures of them on Google Maps.



That is an interesting argument, but the determination as to whether or not it applies can only be given by a court.  Since the number you speak of is never more than ten digits - like a phone number - and you can't copyright a number even when it clearly has some notion of creativity (e.g. "2424242424" or "8675309"), I doubt many courts will agree with this argument.

Since any digital work is simply an integer, and digital works are protected, there has to be precedence on where the line is drawn.

I'll see what I can find.

That works when the software is something like Adobe Illustrator and the software is the tool, not the author.  The key concept of creativity is that it is human expression.  The output of a completely automated process is not creativity in my understanding of Feist.


Bitcoins are probably more akin to virtual property, like swords in MMORPGs, rather than intellectual property.  Is there any case law suggesting that virtual property isn't property?  If not, then "legally Bitcoins have no standing as property" is probably best described as undetermined rather than true.

Whether or not there's a precedent probably depends on whether anyone on trial for copying copyrighted works tried to use "but it's a file, and files are 0's and 1's, and when you string them together, it's just a big number, and numbers aren't copyrightable, therefore digital music isn't copyrightable either" as a defense.  I bet most lawyers would consider it pretty weak and wouldn't waste their time arguing it.  So the chances of there being no precedent are pretty good.

I will bet that 98% of the legal profession doesn't know that, even though that's 100% true.  If it came to be tested, I doubt it would ever result in a finding that "all integers > x" are copyrightable.  Rather, I would expect something along the lines that consider the totality of the circumstances.

A reasonable litmus test would be whether the average joe would look at something and say "That's a number".  If it's an MP3 file, joe would probably say "That's a song", and the test would evaluate to false.  Something 10 digits or less is going to be a "number" pretty much all the time.

Why? How is it any different than a numbered bank account, or electronically traded stocks? In either case we're just talking about numbers in ledgers and transactions on disk on the wire. Just as intangible as bitcoin, but there's perfectly clear ownership.

I think you're seeing a problem where there is none.

To play devils advocate, say I were to create a private key to Haiku converter.  Say it was integrated into the client where the private keys were generated and stored as Haikus.  Does clicking the new address button create a "creative" enough work to enjoy copyright protection?  As a programmer I'd say no, but as a judge or jury I don't know. 

Your clarification of undetermined vs true is quite astute as well.

Virtual property is pretty much the cutting edge of intellectual property law theory.  I'm hope it will be better suited to this problem than current copyright laws.  I'm trying to find all the proceedings for Bragg v. Linden Lab to see what they cited for the Second Life suit to understand what laws were cited.  The judge in that case was on point:

“Ultimately at issue in this case are the novel questions of what rights and obligations grow out of the relationship between the owner and creator of a virtual world and its resident-customers. While the property and the world where it is found are ‘virtual,’ the dispute is real.”

The ownership is clear for bank accounts and stocks because of existing property laws and rights for those items specifically. If I understand correctly, the Uniform Commercial Code as adopted by the 50 states in the U.S. is relevant.

I agree with you in principle, but I do believe there are technicalities in play which complicate matters when trying to determine what Bitcoins are legally.  Which is how I got to asking about the license on the block chain.

The generator itself would be creative work, but the auto-generated Haikus that simply represent random numbers would not be.

I would expect a judge to understand that, even without needing to be a programmer.

A jury, you'd never know.  Those haikus are going to be pretty nonsensical sounding.

Even if a jury would give a resounding yes, it's the wrong area of law.  Intellectual property law exists to promote the sciences and useful arts as an incentive toward creativity, you want a legal framework to assert property rights on an intangible asset.  Intangible property is nothing new, has existed long before computers and virtual worlds, and  there's plenty of law to acknowledge it and define rights regarding it.  This is the law that would apply the most to Bitcoin.

Understood and appreciated.  I was just trying it on since copyright could protect against making unauthorized copies of a private key.

Separating intellectual property from general intangible property is probably the right thing to do.  A bank account is a much better reference than a painting in this context.

Just thinking out loud: If I own the balance in the block chain as an intangible asset and it is the only thing that gives me the right to spend it, then I've separated the right to spend from possession of the private key.  In that context, I haven't been wronged if someone steals my private keys and publishes them.  I've only been wronged when someone spends the coins.

I'll have to ponder on this some.  Thanks.

Feist seems to reject creativity, at least creativity having certain purposes, from justifying copyright.

Maybe though I have not read enough details of the case.

I guess my interpretation hinges upon whether the creative composing, selection, and placing of untrue "facts" regarding the phone numbers of persons invented by the publisher but not actually existing nor having the listed phone numbers in fact, was a mechanically-generated set of non-player-characters and phone numbers for those non-player-characters or these fictional characters like many many other fictional characters found throughout literature were creatively imagined/invented by human creativity.

Since right up near the top of the page it makes it clear that if the thief had not stolen these creatively inserted fictional characters in their work, they probably would not have ended up in court, it seems clear that not only actual facts about actual people's real phone numbers but also works of fiction pertaining to fictional characters were copied.

How this decision might impact virtual worlds that include fictional characters seems potentially interesting. Consider for example the name generators used by Battle for Wesnoth software, It "creates" fictional characters, including names for them. Was some algorithmic creativity along those lines used by the phone book publisher? If not... if the fictional characters in the phone book were creative works of fiction created by human creativity - where does that leave facts about the adventures of Mickey Mouse and Donald duck, reported as mere facts even though not agreeing with the facts pertaining in virtual worlds manifested by means of servers controlled by Disney Corp?

-MarkM-

Stealing is wrong, so bad word there. If someone publishes your private keys but your balance remains yours, then maybe your rights of publicity might or might not have been violated, it seems to mem but  I am not a lawyer.

Stealing, theough, as a legal term, does not seem commonly to imply lack of wrongdoing?

Unauthorised entry or access to obtain informations, for example, might be implied or somesuch?

Publishing David Bowie's largest balance address, even merely the public key not the private one, possibly could violate his rights of publicity?

(Oops he is still alive I hope? If not then some other famous but not Elvis performer. Politicians might not enjoy quite the same rights of publicity?)

-MarkM-

The fake entries are how they knew it was copied, not the "creative work" in question.  Without the fake entries, they would have a near-impossible burden of proving the entries were copied and not compiled independently.  That is how they would have not ended up in court. "Look your honor he made a phone book and the only way he could have gotten everyone's phone numbers is by copying mine" would be a fast track to being sent home.

The fictional characters were stolen too. Failing to consider them as being works and questioning them was not my doing, it might have been a failure of vision on the part of some lawyer(s) somewhere.

Fictional characters were stolen.

Ask Disney if that is kosher.

Inserting creative works in the form of fictional characters is often used by list providers precisely because if you do not know which of the characters in the list are creative works you cannot defend your theft of the list as a theft of mere facts.

-MarkM-

In Feist, the Supreme Court actually ruled that information contained in the copied phone directory was not copyrightable and that therefore no infringement existed.  That means there was found to be no infringement, even despite the presence of fake "creative" entries that were copied.

The Supreme Court is in the position of being the authoritative interpreter of the law of the United States.  Disney does not enjoy that same distinction.

Disney would not have been going to court over the copying of the "mere facts", they would have been focussed on the "creatively inserted characters".

The decision seems thus to amount to "a few cartoon characters inserted into a display of a real state of affairs in the real world do not give one ownership / copyright over the backdrop real state of affairs against which your characters have been cast".

Doing the case the other way around, I expect Disney might well be found to have ownership / copyright of their characters and that merely casting them against a backdrop of actual state of affairs in the real world would not make it okay for someone to thus cast them.

e,g. Take public domain newsreels and insert Disney characters among them...

-MarkM-