Due to legal constraints, UK-based users still have restricted access to the Bitcoin white paper on the Bitcoin org website.
The Bitcoin white paper has been reuploaded to the Bitcoin org website after Craig Wright’s unsuccessful court attempt to prove he is Satoshi Nakamoto, the protocol’s pseudonymous creator.
Hennadii Stepanov, the maintainer of the Bitcoin.org website, announced the return of the Bitcoin white paper by sharing a link to the white paper PDF on platform X.
Due to legal constraints, Bitcoinorg was forced to restrict access to the Bitcoin white paper for UK-based users. Instead, it displayed a poignant quote from Satoshi Nakamoto: ‘It takes advantage of the nature of information being easy to spread but hard to stifle”.
In 2021, Wright successfully sued Cobra, the anonymous group running the website, for copyright infringement, and the website was ordered to remove the white paper PDF.
Wright won by default after the website’s pseudonymous owner, Cobra, chose not to mount a defense. This resulted in Cobra paying £35,000 ($40,100) of Wright’s legal fees. Wright filed for United States copyright registration for the Bitcoin white paper in 2019.
In 2023, Wright sued 13 Bitcoin Core developers and a group of companies, including Blockstream, Coinbase and Block, for copyright violations relating to the Bitcoin white paper, its file format and database rights to the Bitcoin blockchain.
The Bitcoin Legal Defense Fund responded, highlighting the trend of abusive lawsuits against prominent Bitcoin contributors. According to the defense fund, these lawsuits deter development due to the associated time, stress, expenses and legal risks.
However, Wright’s copyright win no longer holds weight, as his claims of being Satoshi Nakamoto and authoring the white paper have been decisively debunked, rendering his copyright claim invalid.
The detailed ruling came in relation to a case brought against Wright by the Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA), a coalition of prominent companies seeking to prevent Wright from asserting ownership over Bitcoin’s core intellectual property.
COPA alleged that Wright had engaged in an elaborate scheme of forgery and deceit to fabricate evidence backing his claim of being Nakamoto.
Craig Wright’s assets, worth 6.7 million British pounds ($8.4 million), were frozen after a United Kingdom court approved a plan to prevent him from evading court expenses.
The Bitcoin white paper is now subject to an MIT open-source license, allowing anyone to reuse and modify the code for any purpose.
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