Re: [bitcoin-dev] Open Block Chain Licence, BIP[xxxx] Draft

[Ahmed Zsales <ahmedzsales18@gmail.com>]

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Thanks Warren, very good feedback.

To avoid taking up too much of everyone's time at this point, I
think Wladimir's suggestion of placing this in a BIP advisory box for a
while is a good one. We did indicate that this might take a while to
gestate.

It is probably for us to do some further investigations and possibly engage
some input from a few miners.  We don't want to play at being lawyer, but
our review does point towards this being something worth coming back to.

In terms of citation, we did reference a case called *Feist*. We also found
some general database protection details which are relevant to the USA, if
you need any bed time reading:

http://copyright.gov/reports/dbase.html

For now, thanks to everyone for feedback and comments.

Regards,

Ahmed

On Wed, Sep 2, 2015 at 9:56 AM, Warren Togami Jr. via bitcoin-dev <
bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote:

> I am skeptical that any license for the blockchain itself is needed
> because of the possibility that the blockchain is not entitled to copyright
> protection.  While I am not a lawyer, I have stared hard at the copyright
> doctrine of the U.S. in multiple law school Intellectual Property courses
> and during my previous career in Open Source Software where copyright
> matters a great deal.
>
> As each owner of a
>> coin makes a transfer by digitally signing a hash of the previous
>> transaction along with the
>> new owner’s public key, the block chain is a perpetual compilation of
>> unique data.
>> *It is therefore compiled in a creative and non-obvious way.* In the
>> USA, for example, these
>> attributes confer legal protections for databases which have been ruled
>> upon by the courts.
>
>
> This portion of your paper I believe is not true and requires citations if
> you want to be convincing.  Is it truly "creative and non-obvious"?  My
> understanding under at least U.S. law, the blockchain may not be entitled
> to copyright protection because a compilation created in a mechanical
> manner is not a creative work of a human.
>
> I suppose a transaction could contain a "creative" element if it contains
> arbitrary bytes of a message or clever script.  For the most part though
> most of what you call "digitally signing a hash of the previous transaction
> along with the new owner’s public key" is purely the result of a mechanical
> process and really is not creative.  Furthermore, even if that output were
> "non-obvious", obviousness has nothing to do with copyrightability.
>
> Your license is correct in intent in attempting to exclude from the
> royalty free grant works within the blockchain that themselves may be
> subject to copyright of third parties.  The elements within the blockchain
> may be entitled individually to copyright if they are in any way a creative
> work of a human, but as a compilation I am doubtful the blockchain itself
> is entitled to copyright.
>
> I understand copyright with respect to databases can be different under
> other jurisdictions.  Your paper mentions the European database law that is
> indeed different from the U.S.  Your paper is incomplete in scholarly and
> legal citations.  I myself and we as a community don't know enough.  I
> suppose this topic merits further study.
>
> Warren Togami
>
> On Tue, Sep 1, 2015 at 6:30 AM, Ahmed Zsales via bitcoin-dev <
> bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
>
>> Hello,
>>
>> We believe the network requires a block chain licence to supplement the
>> existing MIT Licence which we believe only covers the core reference client
>> software.
>>
>> Replacing or amending the existing MIT Licence is beyond the scope of
>> this draft BIP.
>>
>> Rationale and details of our draft BIP for discussion and evaluation are
>> here:
>>
>>
>> https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwEbhrQ4ELzBMVFxajNZa2hzMTg/view?usp=sharing
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> Ahmed
>>
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>
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