According to a finding by Judge James Mellor in the United Kingdom on March 14, Craig Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous founder of the Bitcoin network.On March 12, closing arguments began in London in the lawsuit filed by the Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA) against Wright, an Australian computer scientist who has claimed to be Nakamoto since 2016.COPA was seeking injunctive relief to prevent Wright from falsely claiming to be Nakamoto.Wright has been accused of significant document falsification to back up his claim to be the pseudonymous Bitcoin creator.According to COPA’s last submission.
“Dr. Wright has been shown to have lied on an extraordinary scale. […] He has invented an entire biographical history, producing one tranche after another of forged documents to support it.”
The trial began on Feb. 5. Wright had offered to settle the case out of court on Jan. 24, but COPA declined.
The goal of COPA is “to encourage the adoption and advancement of cryptocurrency technologies and to remove patents as a barrier to growth and innovation.”It has 33 members, including Coinbase, Block, Meta, MicroStrategy, Kraken, Paradigm, Uniswap, and Worldcoin.In 2023, the Wrights sued 13 Bitcoin Core developers and a number of corporations, including Blockstream, Coinbase, and Block, for copyright violations including the Bitcoin white paper, file format, and database rights to the Bitcoin blockchain.In response to the case, the Bitcoin Legal Defense Fund stated.
“For years, prominent contributors to the Bitcoin community have been the subject of abusive lawsuits […] These lawsuits are frivolous but effective. Many developers have decided it’s not worth the time, stress, money, and legal risk to continue working on Bitcoin.”
In 2019, Wright registered copyright in the United States for the Bitcoin white paper and its code.The Bitcoin white paper is currently available under an MIT open-source license, which allows anybody to reuse and modify the code for any purpose.A court order would ban Wright from pursuing additional copyright claims on it.