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It's time to relegate Craig Wright’s claim of being the creator of Bitcoin to the ash heap of history, lawyers representing the Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA) said in court on Monday.
Since 2021, Wright has been locked in a legal battle with COPA and a group of Bitcoin Core developers over his claim that he is the fabled Satoshi Nakamoto and holds copyright over the cryptocurrency space’s founding document.
“Our case is that Dr. Wright’s claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto is a brazen lie, an elaborate false narrative supported by forgery on an industrial scale,” attorneys representing COPA said in an email to Decrypt, which also provided court documents.
COPA v Wright - Opening Ske... by Decrypt
The new trial follows another in 2023 between Wright and COPA in which a UK judge ordered Wright to supply proof of his claims of being Nakamoto.
Since first claiming to be the creator of Bitcoin in 2016, Wright has filed lawsuits against people who openly disputed his claim. These include podcaster Peter McCormack and Hodlnaut, respectively.
Wright has even gone after non-cryptocurrency businesses. In April, Wright hinted that technology giant Apple violated copyright laws after a copy of the Bitcoin whitepaper was found embedded in MacOS.
Formed in 2020 and backed by Twitter founder and Square CEO Jack Dorsey, COPA advocates for the long-term freedom of the Bitcoin and open-source community. Highlighting the incentives Wright has in claiming to be the creator of Bitcoin, COPA argued that he has had plenty of time to prove it, and that the burden of proof is Wright’s alone.
“The Court has afforded him a fresh opportunity in these proceedings to make good his claim,” COPA attornies wrote, adding that the question of identity is an essential precursor to Wright’s claims of copyright infringement of the Bitcoin whitepaper.
Because Wright has not been able to sufficiently prove his claim of being Nakamoto, COPA asked the court to find that Wright should “no longer be permitted to intimidate the Bitcoin developer community by pretending that he wrote the Bitcoin WhitePaper.”
Last month, Wright published a letter offering a settlement with COPA to avoid a new trial and the proof requirement.
“In clear demonstration of the sincerity of my offer, I agree to waive my database rights and copyrights relating to BTC, BCH, and ABC databases, and to offer an irrevocable license in perpetuity to my opposing parties who collectively control, operate, and/or own those databases, in pursuit of encouraging the open commercialization of technologies in a competitive and fair market, where intellectual property rights are respected and exploited,” Wright said. “I intend for this offer to enable them to compete fairly, in parallel with BSV.”
The offer received a hard pass from COPA.
“Just like Craig Wright forges documents and doesn't quite tell the truth, his description of the settlement offer isn't quite accurate either - it comes with loopholes that would allow him to sue people all over again,” COPA said.
Edited by Ryan Ozawa.