Quote from: Gavin Andresen on June 06, 2013, 05:16:03 PM

has there EVER been a case where a judge has ordered a software developer to do anything other than stop distributing their software (because of some copyright or patent issue) ?

It has happened to the JAP project (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Anon_Proxy)

Quote

In 2003, the German BKA[8][9] obtained a warrant to force the Dresden Mix operators to log access to a specific web address and to introduce a crime detection function in the server software making this possible.

AFAIK they handled the situation by putting in the code, openly labeling it as what it is, and when asked about it they just said "we can't talk about that..." and everybody knew what was going on.
It pretty much killed the project, though, which was about to be overtaken by tor at the time anyway (at least from my point of view).

Regarding bitcoin, I don't think it would take more than an hour to be the topic of discussion on IRC if Gavin did actually commit something like that. Let alone release it.
And, as he already said, our developer community is spread over several countries/continents so it's extremely hard to put them all under legal pressure simultaneously.

Maybe it would be nice to better track / display who reviewed what code. I know you can count the ACKs in the github discussions, but maybe it would put some minds at rest if there was a website listing commits/tags/builds along with green badges representing valid signatures from the core devs.

riush

Posts

Merits