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You can't retroactively patent something after its design has already been released to the general public, can you? Imagine trying to patent a car engine today, if it were a similar situation: the operation would be total nonsense. The derivative works existed before you claimed control; you can't just go and say they now owe you money for it At best I would imagine that nakamoto could get sued for releasing IP that wasn't his to release, and they might be able to lay claim over the bitcoin name and codebase for future updates... but they can't do anything about all the existing forks and derivatives. They already exist! And as I understood it, the Oracle v Google case was based on the fact that Oracle was already licensing java for mobile devices, and android basically wrote a new not-java, which is all fine and well, but Oracle was claiming that not just the implementation but also the API fell under their licensing operation. That is, licensing was already part of the story, it was just a question of whether it applied to Google's usage. Bitcoin is not that situation: no licensing story currently exists. If it were taken into closed source, it wouldn't be much different from forking the code and making a proprietary version of it, and licensing that out. But the codebase that already exists, in the open, and includes a whole lot of code that is by no means property of sakamoto's institution, can't just be removed from the internet Also, can you even patent a network protocol? Because the client itself doesn't hold much value, especially not for the derivative works. It's the protocol that's key ofc I'm not a lawyer, I don't know squat about the topic, but intuitively it seems nonsensical. Imagine doing that operation intentionally: releasing a design so you could retroactively patent and force licenses after worldwide adoption. It'd be dumb as hell |
The creative solution to the “double spend” problem is the valuable piece. The other pieces, cryptographic hashing and proof-of-work have been around for some time. Algorithms make up the largest pool of software patents.
If it went private (it's actually patent pending once publically released; even if CC licensed, the license is null re: invalid ownership), an owner could do what MasterCard and Visa do: percentage of transaction, etc. I bet they could even make a case for ownership of his 1+ million coins ($6.4 billion USD).
The technology is already out of the bag, though, it's not going back in.
This article is interesting re: retroactivity: http://www.toikkalawgroup.com/blog/the-patent-bargain-and-th...