The digital payments company Square Crypto, founded by Jack Dorsey (Twitter CEO), yesterday announced the creation of the Cryptocurrency Open Patent Alliance (COPA). The initiative aims to bring together patents and technologies used in the cryptocurrency market to “keep bitcoin and cryptography free and open”. In a statement the company said:
“Securing key cryptocurrency technologies in patents stifles innovation and adoption. The offensive use of patents by criminals threatens the growth of cryptocurrency technologies. ”
Square Crypto
The patent market can be extremely predatory and detrimental to the development of technologies and solutions. There are companies that specialize in creating patents that they will not test or use, they are called "preventive patents". These companies do this only to gain legal dominance over ideas that have not even been tested, so that they can sell them in the future.
Companies and individuals who want to be part of COPA must commit to leaving their patents open in a kind of public library.
The more companies that adopt the COPA solution, the greater the incentives for other companies to join the project, so that they can also take advantage of existing patents within the initiative.
Square has already committed to adding its technologies to the solution, however it says that COPA will be a completely independent and self-managed initiative. The initiative promises to create a fairer and more innovative environment within the cryptocurrency market. Increasingly following the philosophy of open source software.
This will be a major breakthrough in the cryptocurrency market and a severe blow to predatory patent companies. With these measures, a fairer use of intellectual property by companies that make up the cryptocurrency ecosystem is expected.
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