This week, lawyers representing Bitcoin developers and the Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA), an organization fighting for “threat freedom” regarding cryptography, told a judge that Craig S. He plans to announce that he is not actually the creator of Bitcoin. Satoshi Nakamoto. Wright, who declared himself to be Nakamoto in 2016, plans to close his case by claiming that he actually created the largest and most valuable cryptocurrency in the world today.
Closing arguments are a month-long lawsuit filed by COPA seeking to prove that Wright is not Nakamoto and deny him the right to claim copyright or sue again in Nakamoto's name. will bring an end to it. If Wright is successful, he will have a major advantage in other lawsuits against exchanges such as Coinbase and Kraken.
COPA, backed by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey and industry heavyweights including Coinbase and MicroStrategy, filed a motion to take Wright to court in 2021. During the trial, which began on February 5, COPA attorneys from the law firm Bird & Bird attempted to prove that: Mr. Wright falsified evidence to support his claim that he was Nakamoto and claimed that Mr. Wright did not have the knowledge or expertise to create Bitcoin.
“We worked on this for developers, and we want to make sure they feel free to do so without being threatened by the very act of helping improve and iterate on Bitcoin,” a COPA spokesperson said. the person in charge said.
COPA's team is scheduled to make closing arguments on Tuesday.
Wright has filed a separate lawsuit in the UK against a group of Bitcoin developers, and has previously fought to obtain sole intellectual property rights to the Bitcoin white paper. Mr. Wright is a Nakamoto because he believes that no other organization should host a white paper. His team will make closing arguments in the identity case on Wednesday, and COPA will have a chance to respond on Friday.
According to a COPA spokesperson, the February trial is just the first part of the entire case. he told CoinDesk.
“The first step is, 'Is Dr. Wright Satoshi Nakamoto?' If not, that's it. And we may consider whether to appeal,” the spokesperson said.
If Wright does not appeal, COPA will seek injunctive relief, a legal remedy that can require a defendant to stop doing something.
“They're going to try to stop him from claiming to be Satoshi Nakamoto again, they're going to try to stop him from claiming to be the author of the Bitcoin White Paper, they're going to try to stop him from claiming to be the author of the Bitcoin White Paper, they're going to try to prevent him from continuing to fight the war. “We will also pursue various other remedies to try to avoid this in the form of lawsuits against developers and individuals based on his identity as Satoshi Nakamoto,” the spokesperson said. Ta.
If Wright is not Nakamoto, then he has no database rights in the Bitcoin blockchain, no file format rights in the Bitcoin file format, “and he has no standing to sue for anything… “It's his,'' a COPA spokesperson insisted.
Chief Justice James Mellor will have to oversee two more cases filed by Wright against several prominent crypto companies. According to COPA, Mr. Mellor decided to put these cases on hold because their outcome depends on whether Mr. Wright is Satoshi.
“Judge Mellor recognizes that it is efficient to resolve the issue of identity first before moving on to anything else.” A COPA spokesperson said:
One of the pending cases is what COPA calls a “database rights case.” Wright has sued cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, Dorsey's the Block, open source software BTCCore, and many other individuals for holding database rights and file format rights to the Bitcoin blockchain. filed a lawsuit.
A “spoofing'' lawsuit has also been filed against Kraken, a cryptocurrency exchange similar to Coinbase. Wright, who spearheaded the Bitcoin Satoshis Vision (Bitcoin SV) fork in 2018, says that what these exchanges are selling is not actually Bitcoin, but Wright's intellectual property. He claimed that it was a fake.
If Wright wins, the identity case will enter a second phase, “if the court determines it is plausible that he is Satoshi Nakamoto,” in the words of a COPA spokesperson.
A COPA spokesperson said the original Bitcoin white paper was published under the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's open source license. The second step is whether the publication of the white paper falls under the terms of the MIT Open Source License.
A COPA spokesperson said people would still have the right to publish whitepapers even if they fall under MIT's open source license.
Mr Justice Mellor has not said when he will issue his ruling on whether Mr Wright is in fact using the pseudonym Nakamoto, but a decision on costs and remedies will be made shortly after. It turns out.
Both Mr Wright and his lawyer, barrister Craig Orr, declined to comment on the implications for the trial.
