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/.
I don't see how you can possibly conclude this effort is worth any
additional time. The legal reference is: Feist Publications, Inc., v.
Rural Telephone Service Co., 499 U.S. 340 (1991). The court ruled that
Rural's directory was nothing more than an alphabetic list of all
subscribers to its service, which it was required to compile under law,
and that no creative expression was involved. The fact that Rural spent
considerable time and money collecting the data was irrelevant to
copyright law, and Rural's copyright claim was dismissed.
If some entity puts a copyright notice, demands a license, signs
software with a certificate, claims developers or miners are some legal
entity, etc. then those entities are setting themselves up to be sued or
prosecuted (whether legitimately or not). There is no benefit to
claiming such ownership or authority or issuing any license because
nobody is going to enforce anything and they don't even have that
authority anyway. A 5-minute talk with an IP lawyer should confirm that
... but you sound like you are not going to do that. Bitcoin certainly
attracts quite a number of completely irrational people.
Russ
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