jgarzik: Will you provide this information? If not within your next post in this thread, I will be certain to delete the contents in the wiki post and request that an admin/mod delete the wiki page entirely so that it is a little bit more difficult for it to be used as a reference for further developments. This should help to prevent usage of the documentation produced and publicized by you and prevent any legality that may otherwise be pursued by you or anyone else in this matter.
It is the standard "license" afforded by the law and the Berne Convention, attached to all copyrighted works -- one must obtain permission from the author before copying. And I have not given permission.
Mainly, I have not given permission because it is woefully incomplete, I have some plans for that doc, and it was not only illegal but disrespectful to copy it without asking first. Still waiting for a simple acknowledgement that it was wrong, which would make me a
lot more amenable to a creative commons license.
But as long as the community blatantly endorses illegal theft of copyrighted works, the motivation to cooperate is rather low.
If necessary, perhaps the protocol can be altered slightly to accomodate for documentation of the protocol in a way that is different from that of jgarzik's documentation and thus a kind of documentation can be produced by someone else so that its it not similar to or deemed a derivative and can be established as a unique work and hopefully this is done by someone who does not pursue a similar claim of ownership causing even further discussion to take place. I am uncertain of whether or not this is necessary, but it seems to be a kind of solution that can resolve the matter rather quickly.
There is no need to alter the protocol, that's silly. I have
never claimed that my copyright covers the protocol itself (because I don't want to, and more importantly, I legally cannot).
It is the
specific English description of how things work that is copyrighted, not the protocol itself. If someone comes up with a bitcoin protocol description, without starting from my doc, that is 100% legal in all countries as far as I'm aware.
Anyone who writes their own protocol doc gets their own copyright, may assign their own open source license to the work, etc. It is highly unlikely that a from-scratch effort would result in the same word-for-word data, the same arrangement and order of document sections, etc.