RE: The Legal Basis of Cryptocurrency Forks

What @blocktrades described above is what the Hive fork from Steem did:

creates a fork that doesn’t contain a user’s stake from a previous fork of the software

Implicit in this statement was that the old fork and cryptocurrency continued running unchanged, including keeping the coin name and exchange listings etc.
Because a "fork" where the blockchains on both sides don't actually continue running is not a fork at all in the normal English language usage of the term (not geekspeak).

What HF23 did was not a fork, merely a code change to an existing blockchain that stole property from one set of users and gave it to another.

There is nothing "new" about New Steem apart from theft.
It has retained all the valuable accoutrements of old Steem (exchange listings, coin name, front end websites, marketing Intellectual Property, founder company support etc) and is legally the same asset.

By contrast Hive was a true fork with Steem and Hive going their separate ways but with Hive having to create all these accoutrements from scratch.
Hive is legally a new asset.

Calling it a code change does not change the fact that it was a fork, its a hard fork. Also, no one is obligated to run old code, if witnesses choose to run a new fork no one can force them to continue running old code. Ticker symbols are technically no-man's land, since they don't belong to the blockchain or a company and are ultimately up to the exchanges to agree to use or not.

A blockchain is not a corporation, no one owns the blockchain and no company has intellectual property rights over it if it is an opensource blockchain. Blocktrades pointed it out, the situation is the same in both cases, you cannot coerce anyone to run a copy of a blockchain. You have every right to run the old code yourself, but you cannot force the consensus witnesses to run the old version.

I'm not disagreeing with your stance in favor of Steem over Hive. What all this so far has told me is that public blockchains using DPoS are not effective for storing value. And that the witness system doesn't work. For a blockchain's assets to be a good SoV that blockchain needs to be maximally decentralized.

I'm not condoning Justin or the Hive founders, I think both parties acted shamefully. My conclusion is that what we are seeing is that delegated proof of stake is a failed consensus system for a blockchain intended for storing value precisely because you cannot force the witnesses to run the code you want.