Craig Wright wins default judgment, Bitcoin.org must remove Bitcoin Whitepaper

Bitcoin.org must now remove the Bitcoin whitepaper, host a notice referring to the court’s judgment, and pay $48,600 to cover Wright’s legal costs.

The self-proclaimed Satoshi Nakamoto and Bitcoin SV proponent, Craig Wright, has won a legal battle claiming copyright infringement on the part of bitcoin.org for hosting the Bitcoin whitepaper.

Wright won by default after the website’s pseudonymous owner, “Cøbra,” chose not to mount a defense.

Bitcoin.org must now remove the whitepaper and display a notice referring to the judgment and cough up at least 35,000 GBP ($48,600) to cover Wright’s legal costs. Cøbra responded to the ruling on Twitter: 

I don’t think you could get a better advertisement of *why* Bitcoin is necessary than what happened today.

Rules enforced through cryptography are far more superior than rules based on whoever can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in court.

— Cøbra (@CobraBitcoin) June 28, 2021

Onter LLP, Wright’s legal representation, celebrated the victory as “an important development in Dr Wright’s quest to obtain judicial vindication of his copyright in his White Paper.” 

“Dr Wright does not wish to restrict access to his White Paper,” wrote Onter senior associate, Simon Cohen. “However, he does not agree that it should be used by supporters and developers of alternative assets, such as Bitcoin Core, to promote or otherwise misrepresent those assets as being Bitcoin given that they do not support or align with the vision for Bitcoin as he set out in his White Paper.”

Related: The first days of Bitcoin and Dustin D. Trammell’s emails with Satoshi Nakamoto

In January, Wright issued letters to bitcoin.org, bitcoin.com, and bitcoincore.org, demanding they remove copies of the Bitcoin whitepaper from their websites and asserting they were infringing his intellectual property.

In April, Wright received permission to serve Cøbra outside of U.K. jurisdiction by email, with the bitcoin.org operator having 22 days to respond from April 26.

Last month, Cøbra tweeted that they had missed the deadline. Responding to speculation they may have missed the deadline to maintain anonymity, Cobra said: “No. I didn’t show up because defending against nonsense is a waste of time.”