Craig Wright Threatens Legal Action On Bitcoin’s Development Team Over Infringement of Intellectual Property

The controversial Australian entrepreneur Craig Wright is once again in news for doubling down on his claims of being the real Satoshi Nakamoto aka the mysterious identity behind the Bitcoin founder.

In his blog post published last Thursday, Wright writes that he plans to legal action against the Bitcoin core developer team while claiming infringement of his intellectual property. He further went to show his authority saying future hardforks in the Bitcoin network shall be allowed under open-source MIT license which will permit the release of Bitcoin but not its database.

Wright wrote: "As the sole creator of Bitcoin, I own full rights to the Bitcoin registry. People can fork my software and make alternative versions. But, they have no rights to change the protocol using the underlying database”.

He further added that Bitcoin Core (the group that maintains and develops bitcoin) and Bitcoin ABC "have sought to use my database without authority”.

It has to be noted that Craig Wright since long has been claiming to be the real Bitcoin creator, however, his claims haven’t been proven legally. Moreover, Wright has been a big supporter of Bitcoin’s forked version called the Bitcoin SV or the Bitcoin Satoshi Version.

In his blog post, Wright wrote a warning message saying he might pursue a legal action for against Bitcoin ABC and Bitcoin Core developers. He said: "Those involved with the copied systems that are passing themselves off as Bitcoin ... are hereby put on notice. Please trust me when I say that I’m far nicer before the lawyers get involved.”

Wright also added that he the “database rights” in the UK and the European Union. He wrote: "As a part of distributed global partnerships, senior partners within Core or ABC reside within Europe and the UK, presenting the opportunity to incorporate them in the matter without any jurisdictional challenges”.

Additionally, he also claims that he has issued all 21 million Bitcoin tokens and that the nodes are in effect “agents to my network”. He wrote: "If you negotiate with me, arrangements can be made allowing the continuance of selected copies of my network, with a set of restrictions. In other words, I am willing to license ... the Bitcoin database. I will do so on my terms”.

Last year in May 2019, Wright applied for a copyright claim in the United States for the Bitcoin original code and the Bitcoin whitepaper. The Copyright Office however rejected Wright’s claims saying that it doesn’t recognize him as the author of this work.