What is the Crypto Open Patent Alliance ?
It is also known as COPA and is a nonprofit alliance that is made up of firms such as Ark.io, Bitbank, BitPay, Blockchain Commons, BlockStream, Coinbase, Kraken, Lisk, MicroStrategy, OKCOIN, Satoshi Labs, Stacks, Stakenet, Square and Verify Chain. That said, anyone can join the consortium of firms and benefit from the patent alliance regardless if you have a patent or not. The link to the COPA alliance join page is here --> https://www.opencrypto.org/joining/
What are the Goals of COPA: They desire to Eliminate Barriers to Innovation and protect against Litigation!
How COPA works:
1) COPA members pledge never to use their crypto-technology patents against anyone, except for defensive reasons, effectively making their patents freely available for all.
2) Members pool all of their crypto-technology patents together to form a shared patent library, which provides a forum to allow members to reasonably negotiate lending patents to one another for defensive purposes.
The patent pledge and the shared patent library work in tandem to help drive down the incidence and threat of patent litigation, benefiting the cryptocurrency community as a whole.
3) COPA monitors core technologies and entities that support cryptocurrency and does its best to research and help address litigation threats against community members.
4) Some members such as Square have provided their Crypto patents to the COPA Pool allowing further access to great resources for further benefit for all.
Why COPA is important, the alliance is all-in on defending the technology and collective works. Has COPA already taken action? Yes, they have already taken COPA filed a civil lawsuit against the self-styled Bitcoin inventor, Craig Wright over the ownership of the Bitcoin white paper. Why is this important to the entire crypto realm? It brings a sense of safety from the threat of lawsuits and is a precursor to good collaboration across the entire crypto realm.
Summary - a defensive non-profit that already has wide spread buy-in from the crypto big hitters and it already hitting back at the Patent Trolls! I expect COPA to continue to grow in size and importance not just this year but each year moving forward! Can you see the value?
