Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA) Rejects Satoshi Settlement Offer Weeks Before Trial
The Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA) has rejected a settlement offer brought forth by Dr. Craig Steven Wright, an Australian computer scientist and part of the main team that created Bitcoin.
The settlement offer in a nutshell would have had Dr. Wright passing off claims against Coinbase and Kraken, and his database rights claim against BTC Core—an offer that would put an end to those litigations and prevent BTC, BCH and ABC from claiming to represent Satoshi Nakamoto’s original Bitcoin.
More specifically, Dr. Wright would agree not to pursue any claim connected to his database rights and copyrights in the BTC, BCH, and ABC blockchains. These are the rights which arise from his invention and ownership of the Bitcoin blockchain, and would effectively conclude COPA v Wright (IL-2022-000019), Wright v Coinbase (IL-2022-000035), Wright v Payward (IL-2022-000036) and Wright v BTC Core (IL-2022-000069).
The offer was roundly rejected within hours.
The potential liability of the counterparties in these cases was (and continues to be, thanks to COPA’s rejection) enormous, according to Jordan Atkins of CoinGeek.
Atkins notes that Coinbase and Kraken are currently facing a potential multi-billion dollar bill to account for the years spent using the Bitcoin name to sell unrelated products—such as BTC and BCH.
From CoinGeek:
Taking that off the table would have removed a heavy weight off the back of those defendants. The same can be said for the BTC Core developer defendants, albeit the amount likely to be recovered from them will pale in comparison to the exchanges.
The legal fees that would have been spent on taking each of these cases to trial would have been similarly gargantuan. Under the agreement, all parties agree to bear their own costs (as opposed to the most common scenario of the losing side bearing the entire cost of the litigation) to this point. Further, the money that would have been spent on the trial itself was instead to be sent to charity—beginning with a £1,000,000 donation from Dr. Wright to a church in Australia which supports single mothers.
Dr. Wright 's offer included “irrevocable license in perpetuity to exploit, use, assign, or license” with respect to his copyrights and database rights in the BTC, BCH and ABC blockchains. In exchange for this, the parties would have had to sign a declaration which acknowledges Bitcoin and its derivatives (BTC, BCH and ABC) stem from Satoshi Nakamoto’s white paper. They must acknowledge that Satoshi Nakamoto’s original vision was for ‘small casual transactions’ otherwise known as micropayments and ‘scaling on-chain’, and formally recognize that BTC, BCH and ABC “now have separate purposes and uses not contemplated by Satoshi Nakamoto.”
Intellectual property attorney and author of BIT & COIN: Merging Digitality and Physicality, ZeMing M. Gao, explains the ramifications of failing to accept such a generous offer.
"Accepting this offer would defeat COPA’s purpose, which is far beyond the copyright of the whitepaper and the Bitcoin protocol.
"BTC Core developers will not accept the offer either, even though the offer is good for BTC (the article has much discussion on why it is). If they do, they will be instantly banished from the kingdom of laser eyes.
"Crypto exchanges have nothing to gain from the offer. On the contrary, if they understand the potential capability of BSV, they may realize that in the long term, BSV may make centralized exchanges obsolete. The present form of crypto exchanges exists because these blockchains that have shown up are not scalable."
The trial is set to move forward next month in London.
- Aaron Goldstein, Gambling911.com
