Andrea Tinianow is director of corporate and international development for the State of Delaware, where she works with Mark Smith and Caitlin Long, the CEO and president of Symbiont, respectively, and Cooley FinTech lead Marco Santori, on the Delaware Blockchain Initiative. In this CoinDesk 2016 in Review special feature, Tinianow and her team provide an overview of the work ongoing in Delaware to migrate government services to distributed ledger tech. If 2016 marked the year that Delaware became the first US state to implement blockchain technology, 2017 will mark another first. This year, we expect companies will be able to file documents on our distributed ledger, in addition to current filing procedures. But while we’re just one state in one country,…
The lawyer fighting a one-man battle against the IRS on behalf of thousands of Coinbase customers has not been swayed by the tax agency’s efforts to appease him. Instead of pacifying Coinbase user Jeffrey Berns, the IRS’s change of tack seems to have made him more determined to carry on the fight. In response to a motion to intervene on behalf of Coinbase users filed by Berns via his law firm, Berns Weiss, the IRS yesterday submitted its own amendment to its request for the personal information of thousands of the firm’s customers. Since Berns had revealed himself as a Coinbase user in his motion to quash the IRS request for customer information, the tax agency yesterday said it no longer wished to obtain his data from the company. But in a statement…
The IRS has asked a district court in California to dismiss a filing by a Coinbase customer that might prevent it from gaining access to the company’s user data. Filed in the US District Court of Northern California (which oversees the city of San Francisco where Coinbase is headquartered), the new documents request the filing be dismissed on the grounds that the request was only for unidentified users of Coinbase. In the process of filing his documents to prevent the search, so goes the IRS argument, lawyer Jeffrey K Berns of the Berns Weiss law firm had revealed himself as a user, and as a result, was no longer of interest to their query. The IRS now requests that its earlier motion be allowed to proceed. Notably, in Berns’ original filing earlier…
Could blockchain reshape the world of digital copyright? This was one of the central questions explored during an event today co-organized by the US Department of Commerce in conjunction with several other government agencies. Held in Washington, DC, the event drew a mix of regulators, business representatives and members of the startup world, who discussed the scope of next-generations systems for copyright management. There, blockchain appeared to be both a subject of curiosity and a potential solution to the panelists engaged. One of the more forceful advocates for the tech was Berklee College of Music’s George Howard, who works as an associate professor of management and is a member of the Open Music Initiative, which has been weighing blockchain…
Ted Mlynar and Ira Schaefer are partners in the Intellectual Property practice at Hogan Lovells in New York City. They advise on patent and other intellectual property issues relating to blockchain and cryptocurrency technologies. In this opinion piece, the authors argue that, in the era of smart contracts, lawyers will still have plenty of work ensuring the devs get the code right. In a new world of smart contracts, many expect that formal written contracts, and the lawyers that draft them, will be obsolete. It is presumed that the agreed-upon term sheet will be simply given to a software developer to convert into smart contract computer code.That code will be the final agreement. But what does a software developer know about drafting code to implement a…