Topic: Legal Research (Read 8119 times)

When the law against you, emphasize the facts.

When the facts are against you, emphasize the law.

When the law and the facts are against you, speak angrily and pound the table a lot.

You seem to be a living example of the third maxim.

Perhaps you should rename yourself LegalSparrow - as an "eagle", you're still in the phase of development where the adult birds drop pre-chewed food in your mouth.

You're the one who's going to be apologizing for your arrogance in a few years.

Stirrer ... 

Stop "patronizing" our intrepid legal researcher ... (I miss this thread too).

I really miss this thread so I wrote this blog post on "tangible prepaid access devices" and brainwallets:

Department Of Homeland Security To Scan Payment Cards At Borders And Airports
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmatonis/2012/11/07/department-of-homeland-security-to-scan-payment-cards-at-borders-and-airports/

Brainwallets appear to be safe for now:
http://www.regulations.gov/#!documentDetail;D=FINCEN-2011-0003-0016

Look, I understand that you probably feel like a retard for being completely wrong after acting as arrogent as you guys did.

I'm not even going to address your assertion that I have made zero arguments in support of BitCoin being property, as you're clearly just grasping at any argument you can right now.  Go read through the thread, and think next time before you get behind a loudmouth like Sunnankar. 

Also, don't patronize me about my education.  I'm right, you're wrong.  Deal with it.

Came here looking for the silver spoon-feeding ... got the wooden spoon-paddling instead

Then how do you suppose the law is applied to new things/ideas?

Do you think that when the first cases were argued regarding telephones, that the attorneys and judges involved said "well, we've got no appellate caselaw about telephones, so there's no need for briefs, we'll just make some shit up"?

HINT: This is a question that can be answered with research.

ANOTHER HINT: The answer starts with "no, that's not what they did."


You have not made arguments, you have reported on comments made by unidentified professors and lawyers and you have said that the correct outcome is "obvious". While taking a survey of people with training or experience may be a good way to predict future outcome(s), it is not a substitute for actual reasoning.

Perhaps that's all that you can do right now, but you should not imagine that your limitations are universal.

I suspect that as your education continues, you will reach a point where you are capable of coming up with arguments about how and why existing legal doctrines can and should be extended (or not) to fit new situations or technologies.

There are no cases involving bitcoin, so you couldn't use them in a brief. All you could do is make the plethora of arguments that I've made throughout this thread, and wait for the judge to agree with one of them.

I'm not saying that, but I am saying that the plaintiff's attorney or the prosecutor will need to be prepared to give the judge a brief with something better than "obviously . . ." and "a bunch of professors and attorneys think . . . ", and I think it would be pretty interesting to imagine what, exactly, that brief will say.

I am not saying that BTC is the same as points in sports - but, let's say that in the upcoming World Series, an umpire makes a call that effectively hands one team a win and the other a loss. Can the losing team successfuly go to court and ask the judge to order MLB to award them an extra point, or a do-over on a particular pitch? No - if they tried, the judge would tell them to go away, even though there's a lot at stake, the court is not going to get involved with the internal governance of a game or a sport.

I'm not so sure the result wouldn't be the same if there were a dispute about WoW gold or other game accomplisments/awards - I am not nearly as confident that you are that there are any contractual rights in WoW gold, and that if there are, that a court is going to impose its judgment over that of the owner/publisher/operator of the game.

There are some people who want to say that BTC is essentially a giant game like WoW - personally, I think that argument will not be successful, but all of us (pro- and con-) are going to have to come up with something better than "obviously, my position is correct" if we want to prevail in court.

I also see a tremendous difference between a Player v. Blizzard dispute about WoW gold, and a User v. User dispute about BTC - in the first case, there's a contract/TOS, and the court can order Blizzard to simply credit the player's account with extra gold. Regarding BTC, it can't simply be created out of thin air (other than mining), so for one guy to get more, someone else has to have less.

I gather that I ultimately agree with you about the correct answer for many of these questions - but I have yet to find a judge who will go along with something merely because a brief recites that the desired result is "obvious" or "clear"; in fact, my experience has been that the more often terms like that appear in a letter/brief/conversation, the less clear or obvious the proposition is that is being advocated.

To be clear, I'm saying that the property rights for Bitcoin don't have a clear path of precedence to support them in current law.

I'm also saying that the criminal charges only have to do with stealing the account information for anything of value for something that is not yours.

I also said that the civil case is very hard to defend.  I personally said nothing about recovery.  Maybe I wasn't clear in my example.  The defendant is the fraudster.

Difficulty of proof may not apply to what the law "is", but surely determines how you would represent a client.

First of all, just because it's difficult to prove theft doesn't mean it's not property.  Also, you're getting into difficulty of proof, which is irrelevant to what the law is.  

Second, how can you argue that you don't have property rights in BitCoin and then turn around and say you could recover for them in a civil action?  You're contradicting yourself.  You can't recover a judgment for theft of something you never had any rights to in the first place.

I'm not saying that at all.  I'm saying that standard for the criminal case is easier to meet.

I think the defense can build a very strong case in a fraud situation.  The defense can claim that they never received any Bitcoins, do not own any of the plaintiffs Bitcoins, and have no knowledge of what the plaintiff did with their Bitcoins.  At this point the mechanics of Bitcoin matter because the prosecution has to prove actual damages.  Depending on how smart the fraudster was, establishing that proof could be very difficult.

Are you guys really suggesting that there would be no way to recover stolen bitcoins in civil court?    What about fraud, that doesn't involve an illegal use of a computer? 

Do you really think a judge would allow you to defraud someone of $10k in bitcoins and say, "oh sorry, it's not fraud because you didn't take anything of value"??

Agreed.  Still not property.

Although, the identity theft laws, which are relatively new in the whole scheme of things, are a step beyond just hacking in.  They particularly mention the use PINs/Passwords/Account Numbers/Instrument Identifiers for unauthorized electronic transfers of anything of value.  So that kicks it up from a civil to a criminal case by my read.

Well there would be all the usual laws surrounding illegal use of a computer, etc, etc anyway if your machine/account was hacked anyway.

That doesn't mean that bitcoins are property ... just that your computer/account was broken into.

Along the WoW gold lines.  I found this to be an interesting read:

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1805853

Also, it seems you can do better than conversion if the "theft" of the private keys/wallet.dat is involved.  Identity theft statutes are nice and specific about "stealing" an account number, password, PIN number, or "instrument identifier" to misappropriate "anything of value".

The WoW gold thing was suggested by a property professor and mentioned by an attorney.  There is no caselaw regarding Blizzard specifically, but the idea behind it is that WoW gold is a contractual right with Blizzard.  This contractual right is alienable, subject to the terms and conditions of your contract with Blizzard.  Contractual rights have long been recognized as property rights, and can usually (not always) be bought and sold unless otherwise agreed to in the contract.  Granted, BitCoin is different from WoW in that there's no central party that you are contracting with.  But the only real difference between contractual rights with Blizzard and BitCoin is that they're different types of intangible asset.  There are many, many different types of intangible assets.

Hopefully everybody has gotten past Sunnankar's rhetoric and realized that his argument is completely moronic.


Yes, it's a crime and intuitively it would seem that you would sue for conversion (a tort) if someone stole them.  Even if - say - I have 1000 BTC and I give you access to my account and you steal them all, it's still a crime and you're liable to me.  I imagine it would probably be classified as some type of bailment situation.

Obviously if you defraud someone out of BTC you're liable to them.  If BTC had no value, none of use would be here right now.  The courts aren't just going to let you defraud someone out of valuable property.

[not legal advice and is in no way intended to be relied upon]

Do you have a cite handy for that? I can't seem to find any article - scholarly or otherwise - that reaches that conclusion.


Well, that's the tricky part, right? Many people agree that taking someone else's BTC is wrong, and is (or should be) illegal.

The question is, how do we get there from here?

If A transfers B's BTC's to C, without B's permission, is that a crime? If so, what crime? Is it a civil wrong, is that a tort, or based on some sort of contract, or a statutory wrong, or ..?

If A defrauds B out of some BTC (assuming all of the other elements of fraud are present), has anything really happened?

In the course of trying to track down your reference to property rights in WoW gold, I ran across these articles, which don't appear to answer the question, but may be of interest to others:

http://www.bu.edu/law/central/jd/organizations/journals/bulr/volume85n4/Fairfield.pdf
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=962905
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1469299
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1092284
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=981755
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1100302

All you need to do is prove your claim by a preponderance of the evidence.  So as long as you can gather enough evidence (emails, messages, etc), you have a case.  Didn't say it was easy, though.

[not legal advice and is in no way intended to be relied upon]

Pirate@40 who is possibly Trendon Shavers, organized pyramid scheme and run away with the money, is there a record you can rely upon to prove how much any particular investor lost?

It's immensely more conclusive than anything that's been said here, considering nobody here studies property rights all day long.