Ninjastic
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Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Bitcoin's code copyright relevant question.
by
DannyHamilton
on 11/07/2016, 20:55:04 UTC
That's really an interesting legal question that I hadn't thought about before. I suppose that the "letter of the law" technical answer may depend on the jurisdiction where you ask it.  I would hope that the "spirit of the law" would result in none of this data being protected by copyright, but without testing it out in courts in multiple jurisdictions there may not be a way to know for sure.  Perhaps an technology lawyer of some sort will stop in here and give us a good explanation about how they believe their particular jurisdiction would handle it.

The issue here is are the transactions that a user creates and the blocks that a miner (or pool) creates.

A user uses software to create a unique set of data that nobody else has the ability to create.  They then share that unique data that is of their own creation with the peers that they are connected to via the Bitcoin Protocol.

A miner (or pool) chooses a set of transactions, an order for those transactions, and a nonce value.  This combination of ordered transactions and nonce is a unique creation of the miner (or pool).  They then share that unique block of data that is of their own creation with the peers that they are connected to via the Bitcoin protocol.

The interesting legal questions are...

Does the act of broadcasting a unique transaction created by an individual result in forfeiture of any copyright claim that individual might otherwise have had on the creation of that transaction data?

Does the act of broadcasting the block of data that a miner (or pool) created result in forfeiture of any copyright claim that the miner (or pool) might otherwise have had on that block of data?

If the broadcast of the transaction or block results in the data legally becoming a part of the public domain, then the answer to your question is that all of the data that is copied, shared, and created is not protected by copyright.

If the broadcast of the transaction or block does not legally result in the loss of copyright claim on that data, then bitcoin may have a bit of a problem?