“Craig S. Wright Gets Patent On Bitcoin White Paper And Code” … This is what I read when I got out of the shower and I thought to myself. “How is this possible?” The code is open source, you can’t hold a patent on it. It turns out I am right and you cannot do that. This is an insane attempt to “prove” to the world that he is something that he is not.
As I learned after I read this, anyone can register for a patent, and in order to dispute it, you have to fight it in court. To clarify, the U.S. patent office does NOT recognize Craig S. Wright as Satoshi Nakamoto. This just means that he registers a file to be recognized as Satoshi (since no one else has before). You can read that article here.
PATENT ON BITCOIN -BREAKING NEWS: 5/21/19
Craig Wright, the self-proclaimed creator of bitcoin, has filed registrations with the U.S. Copyright Office supporting his claims of authorship over the original bitcoin code and the Satoshi white paper.
The registrations, which are visible here and here, pertain specifically to “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” and “Bitcoin,” meaning the original 2009 code.
To be clear, registration does not imply ownership nor is this an official patent. The copyright process allows anyone to register anything in an effort to prepare, say, for lawsuits associated to ownership.
Computer code and white papers can be copyrighted insofar as they are considered literary works and, as the copyright office writes: “In general, registration is voluntary. Copyright exists from the moment the work is created. You will have to register, however, if you wish to bring a lawsuit for infringement of a U.S. work.”
In other words you, the reader, could register this post and I would have to fight you in court to contest it.
Jerry Brito, executive director at advocacy group Coin Center, tweeted:
“Jerry Brito@jerrybrito
Registering a copyright is just filing a form. The Copyright Office does not investigate the validity of the claim; they just register it. Unfortunately there is no official way to challenge a registration. If there are competing claims, the Office will just register all of them.
Neeraj K. Agrawal@NeerajKA”
Craig Wright filed a copyright registration for the Bitcoin whitepaper
WHAT’S THE VERDICT?
“People register things for a reason. They want to exploit it and they want the credit for it,” said David H. Faux, Esq., an intellectual property attorney in New York City. “Someone dishonest would register the Bitcoin white paper to put it on his website and get speaking engagements. But at some point it would catch up with him.”
“The market takes care of itself,” said Faux.
When asked for comment noted Wright critic Jameson Lopp said “LOL.”
UPDATE – WRIGHT WROTE:
“BTC is not bitcoin. Bitcoin is set in stone and does not change. Where there is a protocol change, there is developer control which is the exact opposite of what bitcoin is about. BTC is passing off as Bitcoin. It is an air drop copy that has been designed to slowly alter the protocol allowing the system to be anonymized to such an extent that criminal activity can happen. The goal is to create a system that allows people to commit crimes, extort money, have automated ransomware and worse. This is not the goal of Bitcoin.”
CONCLUSION
In the end, I don’t think anyone is going to recognize Craig as Satoshi, regardless of this filing. There is absolutely NO way that Satoshi would go through these measures to “prove” who he is, mainly because he came from out of nowhere, and then provided the world with a ton of value, and then disappeared. This was no accident. He created one of the most powerful, open source tools the world has ever seen and made it impossible for people to find him.
He believed in liberty,freedom, and democratizing power by undermining the the world governments and banks. Satoshi would never try to use these powers against the community it developed from the beginning. This is just a slap in the face to all the believers and early adopters who nurtured and cultivated this technology from the very beginning.
Do you think that Craig is Satoshi? Sound off below!
Cheers,
The Crypto Renegade