In the news:
Craig Wright is enforcing copyright claim on the Bitcoin whitepaper
Lawyers for Wright sent out copyright infringement notices to five parties currently hosting the Bitcoin white paper on their websites. These parties control and operate the websites bitcoin.org, bitcoin.com and bitcoincore.org.
This is NOT about copyright, but Wright’s way to put truth/lie under a test.
It is also a signal based on the “handicap principle”.
And it is an interesting signal.
On a darker side, a lawsuit can be used by a party of a deep pocket to bully someone lacking resources. However, between two parties who are both capable to finance a lawsuit, a threat of a lawsuit may become (albeit in less honorable conditions) the most economical way to find out the truth.
It would be interesting to see how the parties behind bitcoin.org response.
In this case, the only way to contest Wright’s allegation is to disprove his ownership of the copyright, because the violation of the copyright is explicit and is beyond any dispute.
Given the above, because Wright does have the registered copyright to the paper at issue, there are only two ways to prove that he isn’t the rightful owner of the copyright:
(1) provide evidence that the Bitcoin whitepaper was in fact written by someone else not Wright; or
(2) provide evidence that Wright was incapable of writing such a paper.
The trouble is, however,
(1) Wright’s registered copyright of the bitcoin whitepaper is not contested, and has never been contested; and
(2) Wright is a true polymath who is superbly and uniquely qualified to write such a paper that requires deep cross-disciplinary understanding of computer sciences, economics, law and perhaps many other disciplines.
In addition, he had both availability and proximity to the writing of the paper. Even those who vehemently attack him acknowledge that, if Satoshi was a team (a notion that is mostly a fantasy in itself), Wright was a part of the team during the creation of Bitcoin and the writing of the whitepaper.
Now, which court on earth will decide against Wright’s ownership, unless “true Satoshi” comes out and provides clearly better and stronger evidence of the authorship than Wright has already provided?
No court will.
One can only wish that the hypothetical “true Satoshi” would come out. Wright has claimed the copyright to the bitcoin white paper for years and no one has challenged him.
Because of this, Wright’s lawsuit serves also to place pressure to squeeze out the hypothetical “true Satoshi” — — Come on Satoshi, isn’t your sense of justice and basic moral standard terribly violated when this “fake” Satoshi is not only claiming to be you, but now is actually using the “stolen” name to harm the innocent others?
The persistent silence would therefore also be a signal, adding an increasing weight (among others) on the inevitable conclusion: The hypothetical “true Satoshi” does not exist. Craig Wright is Satoshi, a fact that is only rejected on the basis of ideology, self-interest, and personality, not on objective facts.
Clearly, in this case, the entire burden of proof is on the accused infringers, and a failure of coming forth with such evidence to meet the burden is victory for Wright.