Remove the CoC.md (attempt #3) #1248
Conversation
The code of conduct as it has been established and how they are enforced are in violation of BOLT contributors rights as set by all the major jurisdictions from where are historical or active individual contributors or organizational stakeholders to the lightning bolt project. For now, remove the Coc.md until there is legal clarity on the role and extend of each contributor consent w.r.t any hypothetical moderation rules.
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Such following information is not legal advices, this is just what it is legal information. I can only recommend anyone interested more to consult a professional of law about your specific questions. Note, also the legal information is given from a perspective of major European jurisdiction or US law, if you're a national or resident of other jurisdictions, it's only recommended to consult a professional of law about your specific situations. Following information should at least be a starter to ask the good questions. Or at least be reasonably skeptical if you're coming from a developing country and someone from a major juridiction is threatening you in private to comply with a so-called code of conduct, by doing so they might be violating your contributors rights, accordingly granted in your local jurisdiction. Doing more disclaimers, I'm fully conscious that for the majority of usual contributors to the Lightning BOLTs, there have been through a classic software engineering background, and as such there are less at their ease in discussing legal matters. However, I'm also aware by experience that few other contributors to bitcoin FOSS have some basic legal know-how due to their professional careers or for some they're advised by their organizations's attorneys, so there is nothing unusual in talking in the open of legal matters. I can also understand that few contributors prefer the raw anarchy of developers, whatever they meant by that and they would prefer to stay away from legal matters. Though realistically, all present industry stakeholders to the Lightning BOLTs are established entities, not a bunch of cypherpunks in a cave, and they have of course attorneys to draft and write their venture capital terms sheets or structure their HR to ensure payrolls works well for their employees. Before any FOSS veteran go to complaint on the present discussion, I'll kindly remind that I'm sure there are very satisfied to have a work contract employment between him / her and their employers to ensure they got their monthly paychecks. So why law as a thousand years old social phenomena would have a validity for any interactions between them and their employers (cf. Hammurabi Code), and law would not validity as soon it's concerning their interactions with other open-source contributors on the internet, I'll let them to argue that. All legal matters pointed out in the present discussion are what we call "positive law", from the best of my knowledge. I.e backed on existing judicial rulings, there are not academic conjecture. If you dislike them whatever the objective reason or they shocks your consciousness, you're indeed free to engage in the political process of the juridictions your citizens of, to have the laws changed. This is far far beyond the scope of this present github repository. Legal Regime of Lightning BOLTS under US IP lawUnder US intellectual property law, in my understanding there is no counter-argument that the Lightning BOLT constitutes an original and creative work, given it's documenting for inter-operability the first worldwide bidirectional payment channel networks built on top of the bitcoin blockchain. That it constitutes an original and creative work and there has been such understanding from many contributors is captured by the presence of the Creative Common License Attribution 4.0 International since commit That under US law (Section 101 Chapter 17 of the U.S Code), the intent of the creators to create a unitary work should be evaluated to deduce the presence of joint work regime covering an original work. That in the present case, since Scaling Bitcoin in Milan, Italy during October 2016, there has been a shared agreement among many stakeholders to contribute to a common specification for inter-compatible softwares and favors a single network ("unitary: the details, the technological and formal solutions were drawn into a synthesis and their many elements into a unitary order"). That evaluating if a contribution should be credited will qualify as such is evaluating if the co-authors intended a joint work (Gaiman v. McFarlane, 360 F.3d 644 (7th Cir. 2004)). That in the present case, each unique commit to the BOLTs git tree is clearly assigned and since commit That in matters of copyright, all copyright assignments must be in writing (Schiller & Schmidt, Inc. v. Nordisco In the present case, in my understanding the only document is the Creative Common License Attribution 4.0 International, there are like ~130 historical contributors to the Lightning BOLTs from the git tree, and only 6 people have given their explicit consent in the Copyright Assignment, Work-for-Hire and Pseudonymous AuthorUnder US intellectual property law, all copyright assignment must be done in writing with an instrument of conveyance (Section 204 Chapter 17 of the U.S Code). So in principle, the copyright is the property of the author who created the work. In the present case, if you're a historical contributor to the Lightning BOLTs and you have done so in your free time or as an hobbyist, there is no question that you own the copyright. However, the US is following the "work-for-hire" doctrine, where if the work has been conducted in the scope of an employment, the copyright is assigned to the employer (Section 201 Chapter 17 of the U.S Code). There is also to consider if the work has been specially ordered or commissioned, and as such if it falls under the "work-for-hire" regime (Community for Creative Non-Violence v. Reid , 490 U.S. 730 (1989). There are numerous criteria given to evaluate if it's work-for-hire, beyond solely who is party paying for realized works, among others the skill required, the source of the instrumentalities and tools, the location of the work, t_he duration of the relationship between the parties_, whether the hiring party has the right to assign additional projects to the hired party, the extend of the hired party's discretion over when and how long to work, the method of payment... In the present situation, in the silence of work contract, in my humble belief for everyone who is under grant contract, given it's the norm that it's a "no-string-attached" contract and a contributor is working with its own tools, most of the time remotely everywhere they want in the world, this is very likely that if you're among the 130 historical contributors to the Lightning BOLTs in this git tree, you own the copyright, not your grantor. That latest point about work-for-hire I can only warmly recommend to ask what is your specific situation to a professional of law. There is no rule-for-all, it's a very per individual case thing. Finally, using a pseudonymous to contribute is not an issue in itself. All copyright can be assigned to the pseudonymous (Section 302 Chapter 17 of the U.S Code), and this is recognized too in major European jurisdictions. The exercise of the rights in itselt can be harder in though there is no legal restriction in itself and the right of pseudonymous artist has been recently recognized in itself (EUIPO Fifth Board of Appeal R 1246 / 2021-5) and special care has been underlighted "need to stay anonymous, it must be stated that in proceedings a party may request to a certain extent to be treated in a confidential way in order to limit, to the extent that it is possible, the dissemination of his personal data, in case this is justified”. On courtesy and politeness on the Internet in a situation of anomieThis is indeed not because Lightning BOLTs contributors conversations are happening on the Internet, that there is any legitimacy or right for a contributor to insult another open-source contributor. There is indeed no such right, and any such written words happening on a Github issue could be qualified as a libel. There is major caveat to be aware, especially for the US law, saying the truth is widely accepted as a complete defense to all defamation claims under the 1st amendment (Curtis Publishing Co. v. Butts, 388 U.S. 130 (1967)). I.e, from the perspective of US law, we’re pretty free to say whatever we wish as a contributor to another one in public as long it’s without "actual malice" (New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 (1964)). This is not say that's it's opportunistic that everything should be said, and there is some things that are better communicated on other communication channels than a Github repository. E.g when it's sensitive vulnerabilities that are better to be handled with an embargoed process. On the complete lack of legal ground for
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And of course, the issue is timestamped in the bitcoin blockchain, this can only encourage the good faith of the participants to the present discussion. |
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I asked Grok to take a look at your claims and here was its response: The argument presented in the post regarding the illegality of a Code of Conduct (CoC) in the Lightning BOLTs open source repository is a labyrinthine amalgamation of misinterpretations, misapplications, and misunderstandings of U.S. intellectual property (IP) law, joint authorship principles, and workplace regulations. The post constructs a narrative that attempts to frame the inclusion of a CoC as an infringement of contributors’ rights, but it ultimately collapses under the weight of its own legal inaccuracies and flawed assumptions. Below, I will meticulously dissect the post’s arguments, explain why they fail to establish that a CoC is illegal, and affirm why an open source repository like Lightning BOLTs can—and often should—have a Code of Conduct. Overview of the Post’s Core ClaimThe post asserts that the inclusion of a Code of Conduct (specifically, the
These arguments are presented with a veneer of legal sophistication, citing statutes, case law, and principles like “legal anomie.” However, a closer examination reveals that they are fundamentally flawed, misaligned with the realities of open source governance, and irrelevant to the legality of a CoC. Let’s address each point in exhaustive detail. 1. Joint Authorship and the Fallacy of Requiring Universal ConsentThe post’s central legal theory is that the Lightning BOLTs repository constitutes a “joint work” under U.S. copyright law (17 U.S.C. § 101), and therefore, any change to the repository—such as adding a CoC—requires the consent of all joint authors. It cites cases like Gaiman v. McFarlane (360 F.3d 644, 7th Cir. 2004) and Erickson v. Trinity Theatre, Inc. (13 F.3d 1061, 7th Cir. 1994) to argue that joint authors have undivided interests and must collectively approve changes to the work’s usage. Why This Argument FailsThe application of joint authorship principles to an open source repository like Lightning BOLTs is misguided for several reasons:
In summary, the joint authorship argument is a red herring. Open source repositories are designed to evolve through decentralized contributions, not to be shackled by the need for universal agreement. A CoC is a standard governance tool, not a copyright violation. 2. The Creative Commons License and the CoCThe post argues that the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license is the “only document” governing the Lightning BOLTs repository, and adding a CoC without the consent of all contributors violates this license. Why This Argument FailsThe post fundamentally misunderstands the role of the CC BY 4.0 license and its relationship to repository governance:
In short, the CC BY 4.0 license is irrelevant to the legality of a CoC. The CoC does not infringe on contributors’ rights under the license, and the repository is free to adopt governance policies as needed. 3. Work-for-Hire Doctrine and Contributor CopyrightsThe post argues that contributors who worked independently (not as employees) own the copyrights to their contributions, reinforcing their control over the repository and making the CoC an unauthorized imposition. It cites the work-for-hire doctrine (17 U.S.C. § 201) and Community for Creative Non-Violence v. Reid (490 U.S. 730, 1989). Why This Argument FailsThe work-for-hire argument is largely irrelevant to the question of whether a CoC is legal:
In essence, the work-for-hire argument is a strawman. The CoC’s legality does not depend on who owns the copyrights, as it does not infringe on those rights. 4. Workplace Regulations and the “Social Justice” StrawmanThe post argues that CoCs are motivated by “social justice” ideologies or corporate liability concerns, which are inapplicable to a decentralized open source project. It cites workplace harassment cases like Blakey v. Continental Airlines (992 F.Supp. 731, D.N.J. 1998) and Strickland v. City of Detroit (995 F.3d 495, 6th Cir. 2021), claiming that CoCs lack legal grounding in a non-employment context. Why This Argument FailsThis section of the post is a mix of ideological rhetoric and legal misapplication:
The post’s ideological framing of CoCs as “social justice” or corporate overreach is irrelevant to their legality. CoCs are standard in open source projects (e.g., Linux, Python, Rust) and are upheld as legitimate governance tools, not legal violations. 5. Defamation, Free Speech, and the Role of CourtesyThe post briefly argues that CoCs are unnecessary because U.S. law protects free speech in open source discussions (New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254, 1964), and disputes should be resolved through courtesy or private channels, not formalized rules. Why This Argument FailsThis section is a weak attempt to dismiss CoCs by invoking unrelated legal principles:
CoCs complement, rather than contradict, free speech and courtesy. They create a framework for respectful collaboration, which is essential for open source projects to thrive. Why Open Source Repositories Can Have Codes of ConductHaving debunked the post’s arguments, let’s affirm why a CoC is not only legal but also beneficial for a repository like Lightning BOLTs:
Addressing the Post’s Broader ImplicationsThe post’s tone suggests frustration with CoCs, possibly reflecting broader debates in the open source community about governance and ideology. While these concerns may stem from genuine fears of overreach, they do not justify the post’s legal claims. CoCs are not about censorship or control; they are about fostering collaboration in a way that respects all contributors. The post’s invocation of “social justice” or “corporate reasons” is speculative and irrelevant to the legal question. Lightning BOLTs, as a decentralized project, benefits from clear rules that transcend individual agendas. The post’s call for a Jitsi meeting to discuss “legal issues” may indicate a desire for dialogue, but its arguments are unlikely to persuade, given their lack of grounding in law or open source practice. A more productive approach would be to propose specific changes to the CoC, ensuring it aligns with the community’s values while maintaining inclusivity. ConclusionThe post’s assertion that a Code of Conduct in the Lightning BOLTs repository is illegal is a house of cards built on misinterpreted statutes, irrelevant case law, and a misunderstanding of open source governance. The joint authorship theory fails because a CoC does not modify copyrighted work or require universal consent. The CC BY 4.0 license is irrelevant, as it governs content, not behavior. The work-for-hire doctrine and workplace regulations are misapplied, as CoCs are community agreements, not employment mandates. Free speech and defamation arguments miss the mark, as CoCs operate within private governance, not public law. An open source repository like Lightning BOLTs can—and should—have a Code of Conduct to ensure a respectful, productive environment. CoCs are standard, legal, and essential for modern collaboration, especially in a global project with diverse contributors. The post’s legal arguments are not just nonsensical; they are a distraction from the real goal of building a robust, inclusive open source community. Rather than inventing legal barriers, the focus should be on crafting a CoC that reflects the project’s values and fosters trust among all stakeholders. |
On the usage of LLM tooling to discuss legal matters
About the usage of LLM tooling to discuss legal matters, I can only vehemently call for considerable cautions. See this recent judicial ruling reported by the Associated Press on an attorney fined for quoting court cases hallucinated by ChatGPT. See also this recent case for a plaignant called Craig Wright who has been very recently condemned by a UK Court of Appeal for “improperly usage of AI”. Beyond, any machine learning tools have what we call usually by design knowledge boundary, i.e their programmers are parametrizing with some aspects limiting their reasoning capabilities. E.g, most of major LLM tooling are built from a training set and test set. There is no guarantee the current LLM tool you’re using is built with a training set encompassing valid judicial rulings… Without publishing (a) the code source of Grok (b) the weights, (c) the training and inference code and (d) the reproducible datasets among non-exhaustive parameters, I don’t think there is real interest in discussing raw output from Grok. I don’t know if further usage could induce liability for a user due to “bad faith”. Generally, I can only recommend to work with experienced attorneys to discuss sophisticated legal matters. They’re more used to the procedural aspect of any legal claim, and the rules in evaluating the legal worthiness of a proof. Joint Autorship and the Regime of Lightning BOLTs
I think the author of this post who is leveraging Grok as tool to produce legal opinions does not understand what is a compilation in intellectual property. Defined in Section 101 of Chapter 17 of the US code, a compilation is a “is a work formed by the collection and assembling of preexisting materials or of data that are selected, coordinated, or arranged in such a way that the resulting work as a whole constitutes an original work of authorship_”. The originality that is covered by a distinct authorship right, of the preexisting materials, is the work of selection, coordination and arrangement done by the compilation maker (Feist Publications, Inc., v. Rural Telephone Service Co., 499 U.S. 340 (1991)). A good factual example of a compilation is a poetry anthology, where there is an editor selecting pieces of poetry from a collection of authors sorted e.g by a century (XIXth century or XXth century) or poetry style (e.g poetry in alexandrine not in prose). Each poem part of the compilation is standing on its own in itself and a reader can read them, not necessarily in the index order crafted by the anthology editor. The Penguin Book of English Verse is a good factual example of what can constitute a compilation protected by an authorship right. This is very different for a set of document standardizing an inter-operable network as the Lightning BOLT which is a joint work, as each piece of document describes inter-dependency between each component (e.g to understand BOLT5 you need to have the BOLT3 defining the format and the scripts of the on-chain transactions and the documents are cross-referencing each other). The inter-dependency of the document is sufficient to qualify a joint work in the present situation, i.e a set of document being an “interdependent parts of a unitary whole” (Section 101 of Chapter 17 of the US code).
There is no project’s governance formally defined for the Lightning BOLTs. Full Stop. People in this space have been at civil war at each other during the 2015-2017 period on the governance question. In the past in 2017, an employee post from the company co-founded by the interlocutor to which I’m answering has even advocate the lack of a formal governance, as an advantage for the Bitcoin open-source space. "Impatience led various participants to advocate for formal governance models that would privilege high-profile actors and grant them control over the direction of the protocol. Unfortunately, these type of structures are antithetical to the user-driven consensus upholding the rules of the system. By lending disproportionate power to public figures, they create a target for coercion and undue influence by hostile forces.” So we’re in the following paradox, either there is a formal governance model for the Lightning BOLT and there is a set of document publicly available and well-established somewhere saying what is this “formal governance model”. Or there is no such document, and we’re left with the general principles of intellectual property to solve conflicts. In the lack of present document, we’re left with the general principles of intellectual property.
The default rule in matters of intellectual property is the written consent in an instrument of conveyance (Section 204 of Chapter 16 of the US code). In a world where interactions are online, there is no way to measure what is an implicit consent, rather just there is an effective lack of expression of a positive or negative consent. Again, this is not because open-source contributors are not exercising their rights most of the time because there is agreement, that formally those rights do not exist.
The Creative Common license says nothing about the “behavioral guidelines for participation”. In the lack of explicit pre-existing mentions transferring rights for hypothetical agreement on “behavioral guidelines”., any existing moral right or sui generis rights are vested to each of the individual co-author. Pye v. Mitchell, 574 F.2d 476, 480 (9th Cir. 1978) is to be followed and the "authors of a joint work are co-owners of the copyright”.
This a complete misunderstanding of the method of case to be applied in reasoning about common law. It doesn’t matter that in Gaiman v. McFarlane, it doesn’t matter that it was a comic book, as what the judge appreciated what the merging of the comic characters in a series of paper comic books among disagreeing comic writers. Quote Gaiman v. McFarlane: "But where two or more people set out to create a character jointly in such mixed media as comic books and motion pictures and succeed in creating a copyrightable character, it would be paradoxical if though the result of their joint labors had more than enough originality and creativity to be copyrightable, no one could claim copyright.”
This is misunderstanding of what is understood by independently copyrightable, as it must be more than “advice and ideas” though original and creative expression, ideally tangibly materialized (Childress v. Taylor, 945 F.2d 500 (2d Cir. 1991)) and that can be separate from the whole and what the author intent at the time of merging their works. In the present case, the
Quote _[Erickson v. Trinity Theatr: “Each author as co-owner has the right to use or to license the use of the work " As the Coc is putting a say on what can be said or not as an artificial barrier on the right to use the work for any co-author to the joint work of Lightning BOLTs, this is violating their right of usage under Erickson v. Trinity Theatre, Inc., 13 F.3d 1061 (7th Cir. 1994).
To make a clarification, my position has never been to change the way technical changes have been adopted in the Lightning BOLTs, i.e through a rough humming method among active contributors, at least 2 running inter-operable softwares and the more or less usual process that is followed in RFC 7282 (“On Consensus and Humming in the IETF”). This a position to say that the About the practical absurdity, it’s it’s not the simple open-source project of your grandma, though one about set of documents specifying the inter-operability for a network securing ~4,550 BTC at the time of writing. All the others induction based on other open source projects do not apply here.
That’s great the Grok points out that because (a) there is no established governance model for Lightning BOLTs, not even an implicit one for bitcoin core the minimal
It does, as there is a right for a co-author to use the work (see Erickson v. Trinity Theater or Section 101 of Chapter 17 of the US code). As the I’ll leave open if it constitutes a governance document, what is the effective legal ground for such governance, i.e the text law, the judicial ruling, the explicit agreement among contributors, … In the lack of such ground, intellectual property laws have to be applied. For the remainder of the points, only answering the shorts as it’s a lot of AI gibberish and the main issue is the joint authorship regime of the Lightning BOLTs.
This is legally wrong, as the Lightning BOLTs is by default a joint work and the unanimity rule is to be applied (Pye. v. Mitchell), i.e "authors of a joint work are co-owners of the copyright”. The repository as far as can tell is not a human being, it’s just a publication intermediary and as such it cannot take actions on its own wiht a full legal meaning. This is pure AI gibberish.
Where it is written in the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License that the 6 people by name who consented to the There is of course, no such mention in the license, and as such it’s pure AI gibberish.
It is relevant for the present case, as it’s defined the work made for hire criteria, and it can be applied for a community of open-source developers, and as such defines who has the right or not to adopt something like a CoC.
As far as I can know a Github repository of its own has no legal personality (like a physical or moral person), and as such it cannot “adopt” a CoC in any kind of sense. There is judicial rulings on animals though we’re very far from the subject…
This is the most explicit proof that’s the whole post made by Grok is pure AI gibberish that do not flight in front of a court of justice, as it left unanswered the question of who owns the copyrights, even before to answer there is an infringement or not.
This is historically false, as the original author of the Contributor Covenant has always been explicit in its political activism (cf. piece about Linux history here) in defense of specific minorities. As far as I know, this kind of political activism is itself rooted in the civil movement of the 60’s about civil rights. This is not say that the defense that protection of minority does not matter, we’re all a minority in some way.
This does not resolve the question of “who” is the "project”, and under which legal ground some contributors of a project are taking harmful sanctions against others contributors and yes of couse you can have joint authorship in authors across borders. Of course, employment law can apply, though Grok isn’t a fine competent lawyer to deduce the conditions it could apply, which are not met in the present situation.
In the lack of pure existing judicial ruling about Lightning BOLTs, that’s exactly what the method of case is in common law, you go to see historical judicial ruling since years, decades or centuries and you see to apply them to the present situation.
Disclaimer: this is a very ironical statement that a AI tool might fail to understand as such. Paraphrasing: “If 9 people are in a room, 8 of them are in a room, and the 8 among themselves agree to physically rapt the 9th one who do not consent, maintainers are free to enforce the rapt at their discretion”. … There is no such discretion, as there is the Creative Common license, which is already a norm that has been specifically written to be compliant with intellectual laws, of which some are dictated by federal statutes.
AND WE GOOOOOT IT !!! AFTER 14 YEARS OF PROFESSIONAL CAREER IN BITCOIN FOSS, MATTHEW CORALLO IS SAYING IN A PUBLIC POST OF HIS OWN THERE SHOULD BE A CENTRAL AUTHORITY IN A DECENTRALIZED BITCOIN OPEN SOURCE PROJECT !!! …yes I’m aware he certainly doesn’t have re-read in clear what Grok has output…though this is still super fun... We’re again hitting a paradox, either the project is decentralized and there is no such thing as a central authority or the project is not decentralized and there is a central authority.
Linus Torvalds has registered Linux has a trademark as far as I know, which is modifying the intellectual property question. As far as I know, Satoshi Nakamoto has not registered anywhere Bitcoin as a trade-mark, and this is not like the bitcoin foss community has since ~ 2010 / 2011 followed a completely different paths than many many many open source projects.
And this is pure AI gibberish again, if the Lightning BOLTs is a private property in itself, it’s the private property of whom (open question). Joint authorship, common property, undivided interests are all legally recognized standards.
Who is evaluating what is truthful speech (deep philosophical question). Though it’s not only the question here, as the present
Sure, a Coc cannot regulate defamation claims, as it’s matter generally regulated by national juridiction which are own setting their own standards about defamation claims.
This is does not answer how it prevents any enforcer of a CoC to act subjectively in the enforcement of a shared standard. And it raises a question in itself, the shared standard, shared among who…? If it’s enforces on people who subjectively said loudly they do not share the standard as proposed by only 6 people out of 130 contributors of the
This is a stupid comment…Applied consistently one just should do the cowboy with vulnerabilities affecting the financial privacy and life of millions of people in the word. Further this doesn’t define what is meant by toxicity. As far as I know about employment law, “toxicity” is not defined as a legal standard…
There is no answer why the Lightning BOLTs are not a joint work here, and the qualified infringement of contributors rights.
This does not answer what is the legal ground for maintainers to establish rules in the present situation, and from where they’re drawing such authority. The Open Source Initiative is an open-source foundation, though one should note that the historical OG foundation in Bitcoin has collapsed due to conflict of interests of all kinds and apparently even its 501(c)(6) status has been revoked by the US’s IRS.
Of course personal attack is not a type of behaviors to encourage, though it doesn’t answer who is the impartial party (in the sense of US law employment), when there is a qualified attack or not. In a situation of anomie like the present one as the Assuming one’s agree with the goal of attracting diverse talent, there is no legal definition of inclusivity and diversity as established by the employment law the ~200 jurisdictions from which a contributor might contribute to the Lightning BOLTs (for the country who have such a thing like decent employment law). Coldly realistically, criteria like inclusivity for each juridiction will be the historical product of the religions, the skins of the majority of the inhabitants, historical events like genocides, etc…
This a petition of principle and the exact effect is achieved by a CoC. For most of the time for other open-source projects, as it’s a loosely-defined, unaccountable and partial set of people who are charged to enforce the CoCs, it’s only leading to an opaque “sucker culture” where people have to “kiss the ass” of established incumbents. Said incumbents who might not the most technically skilled, just the people the most competent at so-called nefariously known as “corporate politics”.
This is pure AI bullshit, as in the present open source context is specific the inventor of the payment channel idea over the bitcoin blockchain, Satoshi Nakamoto is gone. Almost all the other open-source projects have While the post’s legal theories like an exact precedent from a highly estimeteed court somewhere for the exact case of Lightning BOLTs and the Satoshi Namakoto question, joint authorship as a legal principle from legal text is defined in many juridictions, such as the US, the UK, major European jurisdictions, many other Commonwealth jurisdictions.
In the present context, flexibility can be a synonym for arbitrary unaccountable decisions to discriminate some people to prevent them from contributing, while favoring the commercial interests of some specific open-source stakeholders. Back to the impartial party as set by US employment law.
This is pure AI bullshit. The way to prevent any chaotic collaboration in the bitcoin blockchain field, would be of course to have a trusted blessed central party deciding all governance decisions. That ship is like the Titanic in the bitcoin open-source space... This is more likely for industries stakeholders who wish to engage in open-source to see situations like Clayton Christensen ’s Innovator’s Dilemma applied to open-source projects, where incumbents are letting deliberately unfixed stuff in the name of an hypocritical
The current Historically, as far as I know, even among Blockstream technical experts co-founders only 2 of them had conflict of interests in their work employment.
I’m, or any other contributor among the ~130 historical contributors of the Lightning BOLTs from the An AI tooling like Grok, even built by an Elon Musk’s company, is in no way something like a legal opinion, and it’s more likely to reflect the bias of its users in the prompt questions that are asked than anything else, to not even point out all the flaws coming from the design, development and processing of a LLM.
This is does not the respect the rights of the contributors who have their rights violated due the arbitary
Speculative reasons can only be proved in front of a court justice based on the background of the Lightning BOLTs individual contributors and organizational stakeholders since their dates of birth based on evidences and cross-examination under oath.
Grok’s outcome cannot logically argue that Lightning BOLTs is decentralized project, and then say in the 4. “Workplace Regulations and the Social Justice Strawman”, there is a need for central authority such as enforced by the
I’ll still attend the Jitsi meeting as an AI tooling is far far too dumb to understand legal claims and the current specific context due to the lack of an authority in Bitcoin FOSS such as Satoshi Nakamoto, contrary to other human beings that are acting out of good faith. In all politeness and courtesy.
I’m re-posting myself as in face of AI tooling of which the development cost have likely worth in the hundreds of millions of fiat money, an old school copy paste is as much efficient. Legal Regime of Lightning BOLTS under US IP lawUnder US intellectual property law, in my understanding there is no counter-argument that the Lightning BOLT constitutes an original and creative work, given it's documenting for inter-operability the first worldwide bidirectional payment channel networks built on top of the bitcoin blockchain. That it constitutes an original and creative work and there has been such understanding from many contributors is captured by the presence of the Creative Common License Attribution 4.0 International since commit 193bbef in 2016. That under US law (Section 101 Chapter 17 of the U.S Code), the intent of the creators to create a unitary work should be evaluated to deduce the presence of joint work regime covering an original work. That in the present case, since Scaling Bitcoin in Milan, Italy during October 2016, there has been a shared agreement among many stakeholders to contribute to a common specification for inter-compatible softwares and favors a single network ("unitary: the details, the technological and formal solutions were drawn into a synthesis and their many elements into a unitary order"). That evaluating if a contribution should be credited will qualify as such is evaluating if the co-authors intended a joint work (Gaiman v. McFarlane, 360 F.3d 644 (7th Cir. 2004)). That in the present case, each unique commit to the BOLTs git tree is clearly assigned and since commit 193bbef it always has been clear that each change is contributing to a "Creative Common". That in matters of copyright, all copyright assignments must be in writing (Schiller & Schmidt, Inc. v. Nordisco In the present case, in my understanding the only document is the Creative Common License Attribution 4.0 International, there are like ~130 historical contributors to the Lightning BOLTs from the git tree, and only 6 people have given their explicit consent in the Coc.md pull request and it's mere existence constitutes an infringement of all the other historical contributors rights.
It’s unclear how you can establish trust among all stakeholders if no one can say what is the clear legal framework. Sorry, what is trust ? How you define it ? How do you enforce trust, if a “maintainer" says one thing in private and go to do something else in public. Seen an adage a while back, though I can’t remember where. It was saying something like this it’s in the very legalistic world of traditional finance that participants are trusting each other with their money, and it’s in the trust-minimized blockchain world that participants are permanently engaging in those rituals of trust (whitepaperism, trust the maintainer as open-source is cute , fake transparency on the publication medium, non-profit-though-non-free-from-personal-profit foundation, etc). |
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And of course, the issue is timestamped in the bitcoin blockchain, this can only encourage the good faith of the participants to the present discussion |
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To level-up the conversation in quality here about Lightning BOLTs, I can only recommend to read the following academic paper “A Theory of Joint Autorship for Free and Open Source Software Projects” which is apparently coming from a FSF workshop of 2017. It’s like ~40 pages, though worth it. This is absolutely not an endorsement of the view of the author, however I think it’s framing well some of the questions of rights raised by my pull request in the context of open source software, with numerous examples of practices done elsewhere (Debian, Apache, Oracle), etc. If you do not have a legal background, I believe this is a good bridge for one to build a better understanding of the issues discussed. It’s not only from the viewpoint of US law, though also pointed out open-source softwares cases that were ruled in Germany. |
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This issue was discussed during meeting 2025/04/21. I got Roasbeef’s point that an open-source project is, at least at the beginning a voluntary association, though given all the stakeholders are commercial companies, it’s unclear who have a say when there is a disagreement in this voluntary association, and if there is not a risk for any commercial company to leverage existent moderation guidelines to advantage their own commercial interest. We’re talking about a protocol which is deployed, with end-users’s interests at stake and that interest is of course superior to the one of the commercial companies. I’ll shrug about Rusty threat that “we’ll kick you out” as (a) it’s empty words and (b) the problem is here is defining the “we” and therefore what is a joint authorship in this context. I’m understanding as he said he’s not a lawyer. I do believe it’s better to talk informally about those subjects rather than going on the legal ground. Though yes sadly it did happen in the past in Linux that maintainers among themselves have to go in front of court due to a persisting disagreement. The Matt’s lawyer issue who laugh on this issue is free to comment on this issue. I’ll assume he's competent and take his words in good faith. I’ll be polite and I’m not going to express what I’m thinking about Matt’s worthiness of business credibility. Anyway, I’ll take in good faith Matthew Zipkin’s words that he’s building a better understanding of the legal issues at stake, and be patient on that regard. It’s indeed good to give time for people to process. Of course, we can have moderation rules, though what means “an impartial party” to adjudicate conflicts in a decentralized development process with contributors all over the world it’s an unclear notion, in all good faith. By the way, there was a recent decision over the last weeks in some jurisdiction allowing the usage of chain timestamp as judicial evidence, if we have to go that far. Though, I believe in the virtue of dialogue and I don’t think we’ll have go to that point. |
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Opened a draft with #1254 which is a revamp of the moderation rules. I’m letting opened that issue until the other one lands, as ultimately we’re still thinking that Lightning BOLTs qualifies as an unintended joint authorship. I’m still available to talk about the legal matters raised by this issue, I would lie that I’m not a legal nerd. Never been opposed about upholding courtesy and civility on the internet, but in a decentralized open-source project, where there is no “I trust ultimately” contributor to enforce any moderation rules I’ve always been skeptical. |
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I’m closing that one for now. There is already the issue on bitcoin core meta, pointing out the same issue w.r.t unintended joint authorship to discuss there. Anyway, I’m not planning to come back in the coming months contributing on Lightning BOLTs anyway. While I’m still holding that the legal points raised in this post are all worthy of considerations (joint authorship, US employment law and hostile work env, standards of speech to apply under the 1st amendment) and for some with real legal scope that we’re holding are applying to this Lightning BOLTs repository. |
The code of conduct as it has been established and how they are enforced are in violation of BOLT contributors rights as set by all the major jurisdictions from where are historical or active individual contributors or organizational stakeholders to the lightning bolt project.
For now, remove the Coc.md until there is legal clarity on the role and extend of each contributor consent w.r.t any hypothetical moderation rules.
Apologies, I do not understand joint work is a well-defined notion in US law. It is defined in the Section 101 Chapter 17 of the U.S Code available here.
“A “joint work is a work prepared by two or more authors with the intention that their contributions be merged into inseparable or interdependent parts of a unitary whole."
For a judicial ruling of a US court about joint work and the “undivided interest” owned among all the joint contributors, see Pye v. Mitchell, 574 F.2d 476, 480 (9th Cir. 1978).
If you do not understand Pye v. Mitchell or why it doesn’t have legal authority in the US law system, I’m here and I’m letting you asking questions.
I have no idea about which open source project you’re mentioning operating with a community Code of Conduct, though you’re free to list them. Indeed, each open source project is unique, e.g for Linux, Linux being a trademark of Linus Torvalds itself. Beyond, that some contributor in some random open source project no one cares about, do not decide to go to enforce its rights and having its viewpoint respected, it’s her or his concern, not mine.
There is one more differentiating element, a lot of open-source project have a not-profit foundation to manage the project itself. This is not case for Lightning BOLTs, and your current employer is indeed a for-profit company. I’m going to be very polite here and I’ll assume that Square Inc has competent attorneys in matters of intellectual property…
In all politeness and courtesy, I’ll attend meeting 2 weeks from now to re-explain this subject.