Comment by kevindamm
2 days ago
It's worse than you'd expect, there's a sizable subset of works with unknown or uncertain license status.
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_works_in_the_United_States
https://martincopenhaver.github.io/files/orphanworks.pdf [PDF]
Estimated 25-50 million books are orphaned works, and their copyright holder may step forward at any time after you've treated it as unlicensed, it's perpetually uncertain (but showing due diligence in finding and contacting the rights holder is considered adequate).
For US works published after 1977 and most works between 1898-1945 the US copyright office has a database:
https://publicrecords.copyright.gov/
but I don't know a good catalog for non-US.
Ah, wow, thank you for the links and additional context. This is new information to me.
> Their copyright holder may step forward at any time after you've treated it as unlicensed.
Does this mean that Satoshi can just come and claim that a whole industry is using his/her copyrighted material?
The above is specifically about book copyright on orphaned works.. AFAIK there is no copyrighting of the contents of a blockchain that they could defend (I'm assuming that's what you're referring to). That copyright would hypothetically cover redistribution, which is kind of a necessary aspect of the shared ledger in the first place.
The more appropriate coverage for that would be patents, which protect a process while making its methods public. Since Bitcoin is open and not patented, that isn't a concern either. There are, however, methods of using blockchains that are patented.
Satoshi couldn't come forth and say that all bitcoin is violating a patent, but it's possible that some aspect of other blockchains or some aspect of an application layer built on blockchain is covered by a patent. For more details consult a lawyer specializing in IP law (and btw I'm not a lawyer, in case I accidentally gave that impression).
To complicate things further with patents, be careful about reading patents if you plan on possibly building anything related. If it can be shown that you were aware of a (US) patent that you're violating, then any related suit that comes before you may receive triple the damages that were decided in the case. So, it's very likely that there are some applications violating blockchain-related patents. Someone could suddenly come forward and sue a lot of people who were being willfully ignorant about it.
Hopefully that comes close to answering your question, this space is far too small for all the nuances and I'm not an expert on licenses.
It was a misunderstanding on my side between a priori copyrighting and patenting for orphaned works. Thus, the first one is possible, the latter not.
Thank you so much for taking the time to explain!