Post
Topic
Board Speculation
Merits 2 from 2 users
Re: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion
by
BitcoinNewsMagazine
on 21/05/2019, 15:45:48 UTC
⭐ Merited by vapourminer (1) ,JayJuanGee (1)
Bitcoin is open source. You cant file a copyright over it.


You can file the copyright -- anyone can. Whether or not it will be granted is a whole 'nother story.

According to this article, the copyright was already granted to be effective as of April 11, 2019.

https://coingeek.com/bitcoin-creator-craig-s-wright-satoshi-nakamoto-granted-us-copyright-registrations-for-bitcoin-white-paper-and-code/

Take a look at https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2019/05/21/craig-wright-registers-us-copyright-in-bitcoin-0-1-and-the-bitcoin-white-paper-what-this-means/

Quote
What can Wright do with this?

Not a lot, really.

Registration is considered prima facie evidence of the claims in the registration — if the registration occurs within five years of first publication. That’s not the case here.

Wright might have some problems suing for copyright violation — for instance, if he wanted to sue those “protocol developer groups” he claims “bastardized” Bitcoin. The software was licensed under the open-source MIT License, which allows all manner of reuse, open or proprietary. The license text is:

    Copyright (c) 2009 Satoshi Nakamoto
    Distributed under the MIT/X11 software license, see the accompanying
    file license.txt or http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php.

The license granted is:

    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.

That is — the MIT License is explicitly a grant of rights to do whatever the hell you like with the software, as long as you include the notice text.

Open source licenses are generally treated as perpetual and irrevocable. There is also estoppel — you can’t release software, encourage its reuse, wait ten years and then sue people for using it under the license you released it under.

So it’s entirely unclear what Wright or nChain get out of this registration. Apart from unimpressed press coverage.