According to a court filing, Craig Wright, who claims to be Satoshi Nakamoto, will be able to make his case that the Bitcoin file format should be given copyright protection under UK law after having his appeal against a prior court denial granted by a panel of three UK judges.
A UK Court rejected Wright’s argument that he should be able to halt the operation of Bitcoin and the system that branched from it, Bitcoin Cash, because they infringe upon his intellectual property rights on February 8, 2023.A large number of defendants (26 in total) connected to Bitcoin, including developers and several units of the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, were the targets of Wright’s lawsuit.Wright asserts that the Bitcoin Satoshi Vision blockchain, which he forked off of another Bitcoin, is the genuine Bitcoin blockchain.
“This ruling means the judges only agreed that Dr. Wright should be allowed to argue that the Bitcoin file format is sufficiently well-defined to receive copyright protection under UK law,” said a statement from the Bitcoin Legal Defense Fund, a nonprofit set up by former Twitter chief Jack Dorsey to assist developers facing lawsuits, including 13 in this case. “The decision does not address the question of whether the Bitcoin file format should receive copyright protection and whether that copyright belongs to Dr. Wright.”
At a trial scheduled to start in January 2024, it will be established whether Wright is actually Satoshi Nakamoto, the person who invented Bitcoin.Several witnesses provided forensic evidence in a court hearing in Oslo last year that documents provided by Wright purporting to support his claim to be Nakomoto have inconsistencies, such as fonts that weren’t readily available at the time.
The issues about copyright protection “will be decided at a full trial, but only if Dr. Wright first demonstrates that he is Satoshi Nakamoto in a trial of only that issue in early 2024,” the Bitcoin Legal Defense Fund statement said. The Defense Fund also cautioned that “the fact that the UK courts are allowing his arguments … sets a dangerous precedent where developers can be sued for violating the file format of open source software that someone else claims to have created.”
Wright’s attorneys said that their client was “pleased” with the result and understood the seriousness of the matter.
“This significant ruling … enables Dr. Wright to advance his claim for copyright in the Bitcoin File Format which potentially affects all future use, and marketing, of Bitcoin and will prove to be a crucial development in intellectual property law,” Damon Parker, a partner at U.K. law firm Harcus Parker, said in a statement.