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:


Regards,

Ahmed

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