Self-Crowned BTC Inventor Wins Lawsuit Over Whitepaper Copyright Claim
2 min read
You would think that of all the places on the internet, you’d be able to read the BTC whitepaper on BTC.org. For Brits, that won’t be possible for much longer.
Dr. Craig Wright, the self-professed (and much-contested) creator of BTC, today won a case in the High Court to force the BTC education site to remove the BTC whitepaper from its website. It is the first success in his string of attempts to control who displays the BTC whitepaper.
In a remote hearing today, a judge said that “Cøbra,” the pseudonymous operator of BTC.org, must display a notice on his website about the judgment, pay at least £35,000 ($48,600) in legal costs and remove the whitepaper from his site. Cøbra lost the case through a default judgment; he mounted no defense to preserve his pseudonymity.
Wright had claimed that BTC.org infringed on his copyright to the whitepaper, which he claims to have written under the moniker “Satoshi Nakamoto.” Wright’s wider battle to prove that he is the progenitor of BTC is still going through the courts, but has been widely rejected by the community.
The order hasn’t been served yet, Cøbra told Decrypt. “Me continuing to host it after that will be breaking the law,” he said. A spokesperson for ONTER LLP, the legal firm that advised Wright on the case, said they did not know when the order would be served.
Simon Cohen, a lawyer at ONTER LLP, said in a statement, “Dr Wright does not wish to restric [sic] access to his White Paper. However, he does not agree that it should be used by supporters and developers of alternative assets, such as BTC Core,” he said.
BTC Core is more commonly known as BTC, a title Wright believes should be assigned to his (relatively unsuccessful) fork of BTC, BTC SV. (The “SV” stands for “Satoshi’s Vision.”) Wright thinks that BTC Core, and offshoots of BTC like BTC Cash, misrepresent “the vision for BTC as [Wright] set out in his White Paper,” said Cohen.
The price of Wright’s coin, BTC SV spiked by 21% after news of the hearing, which was not recorded, spread online. However, with a market cap of $2.9 billion, the market for BTC SV is still 224 times smaller than BTC.
