Meta joins COPA and solidifies commitment to crypto
Meta announced its membership to the Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA) to further prove its seriousness about crypto.
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COPA announced the membership on Monday, saying that the addition of Meta is the biggest cryptocurrency patent commitment to date. COPA was created in 2020 and encourages crypto innovation by lowering the chance of patent litigation by building open-source environments to protect core technologies for all users.
Meta will also be joining COPA's board and will have to adhere to COPA's patent pledge. The pledge states that a member may not "enforce its core cryptocurrency patents against anyone, except for defensive reasons, effectively making these patents freely available for all to use."
"Meta's leadership in COPA underlines the importance of protecting open source technologies. Companies large and small can encourage innovation by collaborating on fundamental infrastructure. This is one step further to advancing COPA's mission, which is to remove legal obstacles so cryptocurrency can become the backbone for transferring value anywhere in the world," said Max Sills, IP Counsel at Block and General Manager Of COPA, in a statement.
Other members of COPA include Block (formerly Square), Coinbase, MicroStrategy, Kraken, Chaincode Labs, Uniswap, and more. COPA said anyone is able to join the alliance, including individuals and regardless of whether they have crypto patents or not.
Members of COPA are required to pool all their patents together in a shared patent library. COPA said that as a result, members can access each other's patents "to deter and defend against patent aggressors, thereby empowering every member, regardless of whether they individually own patents or not, with tools and leverage to defend themselves against patent aggressors."
The news comes shortly after Meta said it would be dimming the lights on its cryptocurrency project known as the Diem Association. On Monday, reports surfaced that the company sold the project's intellectual property to Silvergate Bank, a crypto-focused bank, for $200 million.
Because of Meta's pledge to COPA, it effectively makes its Diem Association crypto patents available to the public.