Craig Wright, a computer scientist and self-proclaimed Bitcoin inventor has lost a claim in a UK court to protect the Bitcoin blockchain by copyright.
Wright revealed that he wrote the 2008 Bitcoin white paper under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakomoto and argued that he should be able to block the operation of Bitcoin and the system that forked from it, Bitcoin Cash after they breached his intellectual property rights.
The computer scientist made claims against many defendants associated with Bitcoin including various units of crypto exchange Coinbase. Wright claims that the Bitcoin Satoshi Vision blockchain he created via a different Bitcoin fork is the authentic blockchain behind the bitcoin cryptocurrency.
A bad day in court
CoinDesk reported that during the ruling, Judge James Mellor said the file format of Bitcoin – the sequence of a header and list of transactions that collectively form a block – cannot be treated like a literary work because Wright has failed to show how they were first recorded, this test is known as “fixation” in copyright law.
“I do not see any prospect of the law as currently stated and understood in the case law allowing copyright protection of subject matter which is not expressed or fixed anywhere,” Mellor said in a ruling for the High Court of England and Wales.
“It remains the case that no relevant ‘work’ has been identified containing content which defines the structure of the Bitcoin File Format,” despite giving Wright and the two Wright-associated investment companies making the claim “ample opportunity” to do so, Mellor added.
Further claims
However, Wright isn’t stopping anytime soon as he is currently in the process of suing 15 Bitcoin developers in order to retrieve over 110,000 bitcoin after losing the encrypted keys to access them after his home computer network was allegedly hacked.
The UK Court of Appeal ruled last week that Wright’s claim against 15 Bitcoin developers can go to trial in London.
Isa Muhammad is a writer and video game journalist covering many aspects of entertainment media including the film industry. He's steadily writing his way to the sharp end of journalism and enjoys staying informed. If he's not reading, playing video games or catching up on his favourite TV series, then he's probably writing about them.
