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 >> >> _______________________________________________ >> bitcoin-dev mailing list >> bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org >> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev >> >> > > _______________________________________________ > bitcoin-dev mailing list > bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org > https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev > >
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