Can only people or businesses legally own something? FYI I'm a programmer not a lawyer so please bear with me. In the US (or abroad), what type of entity can own something? Particularly, in the blockchain space, there exist "smart contracts" that can buy and sell crypto assets autonomously under a predetermined set of rules. If, say, a house or car title were legally represented on a blockchain, would it be legally possible for what's essentially a program (the smart contract) to gain ownership of the title? Obviously the contract has no use for the car or house, it'd just hold it temporarily and return it or sell it.
There are many ways that property can be owned other than by natural persons (not necessarily businesses). Property can be owned by entities and other legal personalities (such as corporations, corporations sole, limited liability companies, limited partner associations, nominees, non-profit corporations, cooperatives, partnerships, limited partnerships, limited liability partnerships, limited liability limited partnerships, trusts, business trusts, estates, conservatorships, governmental entities, unincorporated associations, tontines, funds, etc.), as well as by natural persons. Ownership of property by something other than natural persons dates, at least, to the Song Dynasty in China and to at least the 13th century in Europe. A good modern example is MERS which is the nominee holder of mortgages that are then traded commercially (often electronically, often in transactions not involving humans between entities). A similar example, is street name ownership of a publicly held security within which electronic trades are facilitated. Even when trusts are not created intentionally, they can be implied in law. In New Zealand, even a river can have corporate personality (an idea proposed in legal scholarship decades earlier) and thus has legal standing to sue and own property, through a representative appointed by a legal process. This river can bring lawsuits and own property. While these entities must be formed by individuals at the outset, some kinds of entities and trusts, such as non-profits and charitable trusts, do not have human &quot;owners&quot; in any meaningful sense. You can also have trusts that are for the benefit of animals or the graves of deceased people. The issue of &quot;dead hand control&quot; is a long standing one in the law, which was first addressed in the common law tradition in the Duke of Norfolk's Case of 1682 which gave rise to what is known now as the Rule Against Perpetuities (which now has many exceptions). There is also no prohibition on entities or legal instruments making decisions based upon formulas or programs, indeed, certain kinds of mutual funds (e.g index funds and exchange traded funds), which are generally organized as business trusts, are required to carry out their operational duties in a formulaic manner. Legal instruments such as deeds creating life estates and residuary estates, joint tenancy deeds, and beneficiary deeds have transferred real property by operation for law for hundreds of years without human intervention at the time of transfer, operating as simple &quot;programs&quot;. Likewise, business transactions are routinely effected electronically without human intervention. Lots of e-commerce is conducted in that manner. For example, you do that when you use an ATM or go to a self-check out kiosk for a movie or at an airport or in a grocery store. Sometimes these programs are called &quot;electronic agents&quot; but they need not be agents of a natural person, they could also be (and indeed, usually are) agents of a legal personality that is not a natural person. Even before electronics were invented, vending machines mechanically effected business transactions, transferring title to the personal property contained within them, without human involvement. An early non-human device that conducted business transactions without electronics. (Similar devices have existed as far back as antiquity in classical Greece, dispensing Holy Water.) An entity could be formed that transacts principally via blockchain and that entity would not even have to have owners. It would have to have natural persons affiliated with it in some way, but its main businesses could be conducted by a computer system that these affiliated natural persons put into place for an entity that they form. Legal instruments like paper currency, checks, negotiable promissory notes, bearer bonds, negotiable warehouse receipts, and derivatives all have some of the features associated with blockchains (i.e. incorporating a third-party non-natural person's involvement in a transaction without active management by natural persons). In general, a blockchain is not a legal innovation and introduces nothing that is legally new or revolutionary. It is old wine poured into new skins.
As a designer and programmer you virtually have nothing to worry about apart from your wasted time. Such a network would likely never evolve (unless in Darknet) just because the would-be blockchain node owners would not have the balls to keep the nodes up. If a court in country A orders information deleted, the node owners residing in A would have to comply. Technically impossible? Well, then take the node down. Information will be available from nodes in other countries anyway? Does not matter — nodes in A will be taken down regardless. Note that the right-to-be-forgotten is only a small part of the obstacle. Defamation, hate speech, child pornography etc. published in a system that does not allow to delete information will cause the whole system to be deleted.
The only issue relevant to your age is the (ir)revocability of the license. GPLv3 purports to be an irrevocable license. To be really irrevocable, the license would need to grant certain rights in exchange for something of value, that is, you need a license that passes muster as a contract. Copyright licenses are typically treated as contracts, but it is not clearly established in law that licenses are contracts or are not contracts. Out of the goodness of your heart, you can grant permission to use your property, but you can also withdraw that permission. If you have a contract granting perpetual permission to use your property in exchange for something of value, then you can't later withdraw that permission. In the case of Jacobsen v. Kratzer, the sides advances opposing theories that the license was a "bare license" vs. was a contract. (The matter was ultimately settled out of court). This article puts together the legal factors surrounding the notion of license as contract, see p. 21 ff, and esp. §IV for arguments that licenses should be contracts, to be fully enforceable. A contract for non-essentials formed with a minor is not enforceable, until you are 18. You could therefore revoke the license, until you are 18. Anyone who uses the software does so at their peril. However, if the license is not a contract, no existing legal doctrine (in the US) whereby the permission is irrevocable. In other words, yes you can, at their peril. The whole license-as-contract issue is very complicated, and I'm only focusing on the revocability issue. There is a separate question whether one can sue a user for both copyright infringement and breach of contract. The case of Artifex v. Hancom, see also this analysis, found that (in the particular case), plaintiff can pursue the matter as both infringement and contract breach.
Legally, yes, if you get a license from Blizzard (unlikely, and if so, they'll probably want either money or a portion of your profits). Otherwise, not legally. This is exactly the situation that IP law (e.g. copyright and trademark) was created to address. Blizzard created the game and so they have rights to control and benefit from derivatives there of. There are some exceptions, but prints, buttons, and keychains are not likely to meet the requirements for those.
In the US, in general anyone can claim anything. Others are free to believe or disbelieve the claim. In theory, a person might base their decision to do business with Hilton partly on this particular claim (this is why some software companies start presentations about their new features with a Safe Harbor statement letting the audience know not to base purchasing decisions on unreleased features), and in that case they could argue that Hilton's claim damaged them by causing them to enter into a contract under false pretenses. I doubt such a case would be meritorious, but there could be some contrived situation where the point of whether Hilton owned the hotel when it invented the brownie was actually important.
There is no law against driving a hard bargain If you were describing real estate owners rather than YouTube channel owners we’d have a term for them: a motivated seller. There is no law against using the fact that someone is desperate to sell to negotiate a lower price: that’s just good business. In general, common law legal systems do not involve themselves in whether a price agreed between two parties was fair: if you want to sell your original Picasso for $1 or pay $1m for a used tissue, that’s up to you. If you have ethical issues with that, don’t do it but it’s not illegal. Legal issues can come up where you are the cause in some way of the motivation. A lender foreclosing on a mortgage is ok. A lender offering to buy the property to avoid foreclosure is not. The first is just enforcing the terms of the contract, the second looks like undue influence and unconscionable conduct. Some countries have laws against profiteering and you would need to look at the legal definition to decide if this is or isn’t profiteering. In the US, it isn’t because their laws only deal with profiteering that damages the government. Some US states have laws against price gouging but these are usually to prevent charging too much, not too little. Which clauses of YouTube's Terms of Service would be violated? None. YouTube does not have any terms about selling your digital assets and we know it happens. Which US sanctions would be violated? It’s impossible to say without reading the sanction. If it’s illegal to transfer money to the sanctioned people then the whole plan falls over because you can’t pay for the channel in the first place.
I will not speak to your specific situation. I am unfamiliar with the jurisdiction and real estate contracts are one of the most highly regulated contracts so local statutes may override common law. In general, the terms of a contract are what the parties agree; the written document is not the contract - it is evidence of the contract. In a case where the parties agree that the written version is wrong then the written version is wrong. Where the parties disagree that the written version is wrong (or agree that it is wrong but disagree as to how) then each will need to provide evidence to support their position. A signed written contract that supports one parties position is extremely strong evidence! The other party would need to provide some overwhelming evidence to trump this. The general position that the courts take is that the written contract accurately documents the agreement unless someone can prove that it doesn't.
The information in telephone books is public. so are postal change-of-address records. So are records of the ownership of real estate. So are vital statistics such as birth records. So are voter registration lists -- i myself purchased a voter registration list (in digital form) for a municipality which showed people's names, addresses, and the years when they voted, when I was a political candidate for local office in NJ. It cost about $100. I believe that many states also make driver's license information available for a fee to marketers. Credit records are available for certain limited purposes, also. No doubt there are other public sources I haven't thought of. If such a site relies on public records, or other publicly available data, it is not illegal. Many such sites offer to remove names on an opt-out basis, but there is no legal requirement that sites do so. This kind of information is not considered nto be "private facts" under US tort law. Aside from opting out, if the sites provide that option, I don't think you have any recourse. One could ask the local legislature to pass a law prohibiting such sites, or making them require consent, similar to the GDPR that the EU has. But I don't know of any such law in the US to date.