Blockchain Archives - Barry Sookman

Fiduciary duties of Bitcoin Developers: Tulip Trading v Bitcoin Association

Bitcoin File Format protected by copyrght

Do the developers of Bitcoin code owe fiduciary duties to an owner of that cryptocurrency to help the owner retrieve lost or inaccessible bitcoin after the owner’s private key has been hacked? They might ruled the U.K. Court of Appeal in Tulip Trading Limited v Bitcoin Association For BSV & Ors [2023] EWCA Civ 83 (03 February 2023), a decision that overturned a lower court judge who ruled there was no basis to obtain such relief.

While the decision of the Court of Appeal provides Tulip, the owner who allegedly lost $4 billion in bitcoin, with a potential remedy, what is surprising is that Tulip relied principally on direct causes of action against the developers, being fiduciary duty and a duty of care in tort.…

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Blockchain

Blockchain vulnerabilities – crypto hacks, blockchain forensics and legal challenges

It is often assumed that blockchain based digital currencies and applications are safe and secure. In fact, blockchain ecosystems including cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin and Ether, smart contracts that power a plethora of transactions, and blockchain exchanges have many vulnerabilities. Like many other financial systems, blockchain based systems are subject to all manner of hacks, frauds, scams, and vulnerabilities. They happen at the speed and anonymity of the Internet. There are, understandably, numerous legal challenges when it comes to obtaining civil remedies for these Internet based crimes.…

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Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and intellectual property rights

I had the pleasure of speaking at a webinar organized by the Canadian Blockchain Consortium on the topic of The Regulatory and Legal implications of NFTs. My focus was on non-fungible tokens (or NFTs) and intellectual property rights. Below are my speaking notes which set out my views on whether all the claims about NFTs are true, whether NFTs verify the authenticity of physical or digital assets, what do people buy when the acquire NFTs and what can they do with them, and do creators, sellers and buyers of NFTs need to worry about intellectual property issues.…

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Top legal developments in e-commerce, privacy and intellectual property

Despite COVID-19, 2020 was an eventful year, chock full of impactful legal developments in e-commerce, technology, privacy, anti-spam, and intellectual property law. Here is a summary of my picks for the top legal developments.

e-commerce

Standard form online agreements and unconscionability

Online and in-App agreements are typically presented to users as “standard form”, “take it or leave it”, “boiler plate” forms. Most common are some variation of a “click-wrap”, “sign-in wrap”, or “browsewrap” agreement. They are used pervasively on websites and on Apps, among other locations.…

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2020 Holiday reading: Blockchain, AI and the Four Digital Titans

Happy new year everyone. I hope you all had a good vacation with some spare reading time. Over the holidays, I had the pleasure to listen to four audiobooks. It is pretty clear that the next decade is going to be another exciting ride for us tech and IP lawyers.

The first audiobook was Blockchain and the Law: The Rule of Code, written by Primavera De Filippi and Aaron Wright. A lot has been written about blockchain. In this book, the authors not only look at developments, past, present and future, but also provide an ambitious, scholarly, and fact rich analysis of the legal challenges associated with blockchain.…

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