On Sun, Oct 14, 2012 at 6:09 PM, Christian Decker <decker.christ...@gmail.com> wrote: > Being an international team I'm pretty sure we can find someone who is in a > more permissive country. > Would someone knowledgeable point us to the specific laws, so that we can > look it up in our respective jurisdiction?
The only restrictions I'm aware of are the EAR restrictions on the export of cryptography. These are generally not applicable to us for two reasons. One is that we only use cryptography for authentication, which is explicitly exempted: http://www.bis.doc.gov/encryption/question2.htm The other is that since Bernstein vs US (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernstein_v._United_States) there has been absolutely no enforcement attempts against open source projects as the precedent creating holding there makes it clear that these regulations cannot inhibit the publication of source code. Perhaps someone could make a little noise about binaries, but it would be pure pretext: Especially since with the deterministic build process we use anyone can produce bit-identical binaries (thus allowing builds by untrusted third partities to be just as trustworthy as the official ones). > "more permissive country" This made me laugh. It's hard to find places with better effective law for most online and internet things. Many places copy the US's statutes (either cargo culting, or as part of treaty compliance) but do so without also copying our legislative history which is /generally/ highly protective. For example, Australia has copied the US munitions regulations exactly, but has no analog of Bernstein v. US to limit the government's power. Unfortunately sourceforce was rather vague about what regulations they believe they're enforcing: http://sourceforge.net/blog/clarifying-sourceforgenets-denial-of-site-access-for-certain-persons-in-accordance-with-us-law/ So unless someone has already done it, I'll get in touch with the EFF and find out if they're aware of any particular precautions we should take here. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Don't let slow site performance ruin your business. Deploy New Relic APM Deploy New Relic app performance management and know exactly what is happening inside your Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, and .NET app Try New Relic at no cost today and get our sweet Data Nerd shirt too! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
