The Bitcoin white paper has been reuploaded to the Bitcoin.org website following Craig Wright’s failed court attempt to prove he is Satoshi Nakamoto, the protocol’s pseudonymous creator.
Hennadii Stepanov, the maintainer of Bitcoin.org, announced the return of the Bitcoin white paper by sharing a link to the PDF on platform X.
Due to legal constraints, Bitcoin.org had to restrict access to the 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, leading to the removal of the white paper PDF.
Wright won by default after Cobra chose not to defend the case, resulting in Cobra paying £35,000 ($40,100) of Wright’s legal fees. Wright had filed for U.S. copyright registration for the Bitcoin white paper in 2019.
In 2023, Wright sued 13 Bitcoin Core developers and companies including Blockstream, Coinbase, and Block, for copyright violations related to the Bitcoin white paper, its file format, and database rights to the Bitcoin blockchain.
The Bitcoin Legal Defense Fund responded, emphasizing the trend of abusive lawsuits against prominent Bitcoin contributors.
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According to the defense fund, these lawsuits deter development due to the associated time, stress, expenses, and legal risks.
However, Wright’s copyright win is now invalid, as his claims of being Satoshi Nakamoto and authoring the white paper have been decisively debunked.
The detailed ruling came from 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 engaged in an elaborate scheme of forgery and deceit to fabricate evidence backing his claim of being Nakamoto.
Consequently, Craig Wright’s assets, worth 6.7 million British pounds ($8.4 million), were frozen after a UK 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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