Judge James Mellor's ruling dismisses Craig Wright's claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto in a lawsuit brought by the Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA), citing massive document forgery.
Contrary to the assertions of Craig Wright, the self-proclaimed Satoshi Nakamoto, the mastermind behind Bitcoin's inception remains a mystery, as ruled by Judge James Mellor in the United Kingdom on March 14, as reported by BitMEX Research.
Legal proceedings commenced in London on March 12 in response to a lawsuit initiated by the Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA) against Wright, an Australian computer scientist who has laid claim to the Nakamoto identity since 2016.
COPA sought injunctive relief to bar Wright from perpetuating his Nakamoto persona further, citing his alleged extensive fabrication of documents to bolster his claim of being the elusive Bitcoin founder. COPA's closing statement asserted:
"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 commenced on Feb. 5, with Wright extending a settlement offer outside of court on Jan. 24, an offer which COPA rejected.
Established in 2020, COPA's mission revolves around fostering the acceptance and progression of cryptocurrency technologies while dismantling patents as a barrier to innovation. Its membership boasts 33 entities including Coinbase, Block, Meta, MicroStrategy, Kraken, Paradigm, Uniswap, and Worldcoin.
In 2023, Wright pursued legal action against 13 Bitcoin Core developers and several companies, such as Blockstream, Coinbase, and Block, alleging copyright infringements pertaining to the Bitcoin white paper, its file format, and database rights concerning the Bitcoin blockchain.
Reacting to the lawsuit, the Bitcoin Legal Defense Fund remarked:
"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."
Wright filed for United States copyright registration for the Bitcoin white paper and its embedded code in 2019.
The Bitcoin white paper currently falls under the MIT open-source license, permitting unrestricted use and modification of the code for any purpose. A court-issued injunction would impede Wright from asserting further copyright claims over it.