Topic: Legal Research - page 4. (Read 8092 times)

Capability in fact/physics/mathematics need not convey right(s) in law.

e.g. Assault rifle might give you the capability to slaughter living fauna such as homo saps yet in some jurisdictions under some circumstances might not always be construed as conveying any "right" in law to do so.

(To the best of my knowledge I am not licensed to practice law in any jurisdictions of early 21st century on the planet known as Earth recognised in aforementioned planet and timeperiod's law as non-fictional non-game jurisdictions.)

-MarkM-

Welcome to the new battle-field. Learn how to use the weapons or prepare to meet your maker.


Damn. You probably just took the fun out of witnessing a wild goose chase.


I submit that our "LegalEagle" law student should brush up on the battlefield of the monopoly of State issued fiat currencies in general. And in particular take notice that United States Federal Reserve Notes are actually a State-sanctioned monopoly issuance of a private debt note. The fact that it is a private debt note, rather than a Federal Government elastic paper money supply, allows the Federal Government of the United States to circumvent their constitutional requirement for sound money. Ostensibly there is no compulsion to use the Federal Reserve private debt notes State-sanctioned monopoly "money" (as this also would be unconstitutional), but in practice, life in the USA without using the private debt notes of the FR is difficult so the monopoly exists in effect but not in law. Competing private money supplies are also discouraged with every legal angle in the Federal Government's bag of low tricks.

You are welcome, Mr. Competent. Don't worry, you will come to appreciate me. 


You need to be careful with your pronouns. You are assuming at least four major conclusions of law and have failed to provide any support. This is extremely poor reasoning.


Are you intending to write a paper 'Are bitcoins property?' [objective] or 'Why bitcoins are property?' [subjective] You are welcome for framing the issue statement.

Did no one tell you that nothing pisses off a judge more than when you present subjectively when asked to present objectively? The law is what it is and just because it may be different from what you want it to be does not mean that it is 'going to have to stretch in some manner in order to accomodate' your personal preferences because the law doesn't give two dingleberries about your personal preferences.

To start, you may want to learn how the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm, XOR ciphers and SHA-256 work since asking how big yellow does not inspire confidence in the rest of your assertions. In this case, it would be more accurate to phrase 'bitcoins in an address' instead of 'bitcoins in your wallet gives you the right'; unless you really want to keep making major conclusions of law which are unsupported.

First, there is only the Bitcoin source code goverened by the MIT license.

Second, 'bitcoins', whatever those are, are merely records moved around, more easily by those with the private key, within the output of that source code.

Third, the source code and resulting outputs are stored in hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of places all over the world (Just to be nice, I won't even raise the territorial aspect of copyright law!).

Fourth, the major attribute of 'bitcoins' resulting in them having value is how the source code solves the 'double spend issue'.


Good luck, have your library get you a copy of Dr. Vieira's Pieces of Eight. Hurry, it may take a while. But to save you some time; you are probably chasing a red herring off in the weeds with this issue.


No, no, no, not a bit. See above.

.... with the caveat that any mathematical functions that can derive those private keys can also do the same. Like a phrase inside your brain can give you the right to enjoy a determinable thing.

I think its a great idea to try and pin down the property rights as they relate to Bitcoins.

Bitcoins are definitely intangible. It's important to note that the Bitcoins aren't actually stored in your wallet.  They are just an accounting entry in the public block chain.  If you delete your wallet.dat, the coins are out there forever.

The private keys in the wallet.dat give you the right to "spend" the coins.  Essentially, they give you the right to possess, use, and enjoy a determinable thing.

I think anything that makes it to the block chain has to be public domain.  Once its copied to thousands of machines you give up your right to enforce any IP rights on it.   I'm uncertain as to how to make that happen. 

The block chain itself needs a public domain license that is the only license it is allowed to be used under.

Thanks for the input guys.  I'm probably going to write my paper on the property rights of bitcoins.

BitCoin makes a mess out of the current law (which is why it's a great law review topic), so there are many directions I could approach this from.  Therefore, in the interest of saving myself time researching, I'm going to put my initial (very lightly researched) thoughts up for criticism.  Hopefully, this will give me good direction when I start the "meaty" research.  Here are my initial thoughts; I would appreciate any feedback that anyone might have:

Some question was raised in this thread whether it is even property.  Black's Law Dictionary defines "Property" as follows:

property. (14c) 1. The right to possess, use, and enjoy a determinate thing (either a tract of land or a chattel); the right of ownership . — Also termed bundle of rights. [Cases: Constitutional Law ​277; Property ​ 1.] 2. Any external thing over which the rights of possession, use, and enjoyment are exercised . [Cases: Property ​ 1.]

While it's not very clear, I think that the right having bitcoins in your wallet gives you the right to possess, use, and enjoy a determinable thing.  It's not really a chattel, but the law is definitely going to have to stretch in some manner in order to accomodate BitCoin.  I know there are a lot of problems with this application, but that's the nature of this topic.  

Given the assumption that it is, in fact, property, I think it's pretty clearly some form of intangible asset.  However, it's not necessarily a copyright or a trademark, and it doesn't grant the owner any legal rights (Cf., e.g., an alienable cause of action).  I personally like to think of it as more comparable to chattel (cannot, for all practical purposes, be duplicated; can be stolen; etc.).  Moreover, ownership of bitcoins is (presumably) not subject to federal copyright laws (17 USCA §§ 101–1332), including the length of time which the "copyright" is valid.*

There is some question as to whether it's "money" or not.  "Money" is a term that doesn't seem to be very clearly defined, based on my preliminary research.  BitCoin is not "legal tender", which means that failure to accept bitcoin as repayment for a loan does not put you in default of contract by operation of law.  Nor is it backed by any government.  It is, however, arguably a "medium of exchange".  Hopefully I can find some caselaw that defines money more clearly.  

I think that the power that the owner of a bitcoin wallet exerts over his bitcoins is tantamount to a physical chattel in almost every way except the physical aspect.  My viewpoint at this stage is that the law of chattels will have to make less changes to accomodate bitcoins than any other.

Please feel free to leave any and all comments/suggestions/feedback



* I don't have much Intellectual Property background; please let me know if my reasoning is flawed.

Oh boy.

What if a miner copyrights his creative arrangement of transactions and hard-mined block-hash into a block clearly containing in no uncertain terms his copyright of his unique block that he just mined and, clearly labelled as his copyright creative work, released to other nodes for them to contemplate as a creative work of potential use to miners in general as a creative work from which to derive derivative works such as further blocks creatively extending the merkle tree one or miners are collaboratively constructing, a potentially viable branch of a formally correctly-formed potential longest chain?

Can he be sued for deriving his work from expressions of other people's creative "private key" works?

Worms within worms within cans - within cannots, too, even?

-MarkM-

It wouldn't extend by default.  I'd argue that the keys themselves are the created works, the expressions if you will.

Copyright law was intended to cover the expression of ideas, not the ideas themselves.  So a copyright on an equation would be tough to defend.  I don't know of any precedence chain that lets you defend it, but IANAL.  Any law students want to chime in? 

It sounds like the application of the equation could be novel, meaning you could try for a patent on it.  I think that is a steep hill to climb also.

A created and destroyed private key that is stored in wetware (brain matter) is a whole other thing.  I think I'll punt on that one until more of the basics are sorted out.  The fact that it can be recreated means its not really lost.  In litigation, you would have to produce the key in discovery.  Since you can produce it, it might not matter that it was lost. Did you lose your rights while it was missing?  I have no idea.

So would such a copyright on the private keys also extend to a seed for a deterministic wallet, i.e. a generator of private keys in the case the private actual keys do not exist, since they have been created and destroyed at this point?

Say you held copyright to an equation, it would be like claiming you held copyright to all other equations capable of being derived from that seed.

So my first impression is to stick with copyright law and build a case for an implicit "Right To Spend".

It goes something like this:

The source code for the reference client is MIT licensed but the copyright is assigned to "Satoshi Nakamoto" (2009-2010) and more recently "The Bitcoin developers" (2009-2012).  I suspect this gets transferred to "The Bitcoin Foundation" or some other active legal entity.

The block chain is public domain.  The public is free to do whatever they want with it.  In practice, official changes are enforced in software and distributed to the public only as transactions are confirmed by the miners.

The private keys are private intellectual property copyrighted by the owner of the address as before.

The private keys give the user an implicit right to modify the accounting elements in the block chain.  Specifically, to transfer a numerical value represented by their private key collection to another private key.  Lets call this the "Right To Spend".

So where does the "Right To Spend" live?  In the license of the software?  A separate license that accompanies the block chain?  In the transactions?  How do you construct the right to spend from a contractual stand point?  How do you guarantee it is enforceable?

In this model, the public "owns" the entire block chain but the "Right To Spend" is what makes it valuable.  So the valuable property is the rights given to you by owning the copyright on private keys.

If coins were stolen from me and I brought a civil case, wouldn't I trying to be establishing that I did have property and had been wronged?  Perhaps I've misunderstood you.  Walk me through it if you don't mind.

BIS - US Department of Commerce's Bureau of Industry and Security. Too many acronyms; perhaps I should have been more specific. They even have their own cute little crest.

Oh, I was just scribbling down a few thoughts that bounced through my head. Sure, it may appear like a solid case but there is plenty on the other side. Engineers and computer scientists are so linear; they actually think 2+2=4 when in reality it all depends on 'What is 2?'  Numbers are defined so much better than words.


Now we are getting some where. One of the first issues to deal with is the MIT license.

By imperfect analogy:

Blizzard creates a virtual world with virtual swords, shields, etc. in it that are scarce and become valued in the market. Blizzard retains the copyright on the virtual sword and wants to protect their RMAH. Individual players, through hard work, obtain a virtual sword in the game. The issue becomes: Is the virtual sword property? Whose? Yes, Blizzard's.

Bitcoin protocol is released under the MIT license and created with it are bitcoins which are scarce and become valued in the market. Individuals through hard work obtain bitcoins. The issue becomes: Is a bitcoin property? Whose?

There is copyright, res nullius, homesteading doctrines, etc. and then finally private property.

And this is just the first material issue when dealing with Bitcoin!


You are assuming facts not in evidence yet; (1) that bitcoins are property that (2) can be owned by (3) a single individual to the (4) exclusion of other individuals.

Unless you are attempting to recover stolen bitcoin property, you will most likely be trying to prove that your bitcoin 'property' does not exist and has not ever existed.

Taking the other side of the argument, the non-zero probability of guessing the private key doesn't completely destroy property rights in the U.S. where you have patents, copyrights, and trade secrets for intellectual property.  You can accidentally guess the contents of each of these protections with a comparable probability to guessing a private key: non-zero but impractical to ever accomplish.

For patents, it doesn't matter that you guessed it after it was filed, you still need to license it in order to use it.  Not doing so is a tort.  This applies even if you guess something close (i.e. covered in the claims).

For copyrights, there is a burden to prove who was first to create it to establish ownership, right to copy/assign/transfer, etc.

For trade secrets, the legal protection is very weak.  In essence, you can steal it by guessing because it was not afforded to the other two protections.

This is why I believe in establishing that private keys are copyrightable speech.  Then they can be afforded a first line of protection from "theft" under existing U.S. law.

The value of a copyrighted work has all manner of precedence to draw from in U.S. law as well.