> Having considered the matter on paper, Mellor J was satisfied that it was appropriate to grant the Claimants permission to serve the claim form out of the jurisdiction in respect of all the causes of action relied upon except for the claim for infringement of copyright in the Bitcoin File Format.
> He was doubtful whether the Claimants had a real prospect of success in establishing that copyright subsisted in the Bitcoin File Format. He invited the Claimants to file further written submissions and/or evidence addressing the following question: “when and in what form the alleged literary work in the Bitcoin File Format was first recorded, in writing or otherwise”.
> In response to this question the Claimants filed a second witness statement of Dr Wright. The judge was not satisfied that this evidence established there was a serious issue to be tried, but he gave the Claimants the opportunity to persuade him otherwise at an oral hearing on 3 February 2023. Following the hearing, the judge remained unpersuaded for the reasons he explained in his judgment.
His big "win" is getting kicked to the curb because personal testimony amounts to nothing.
> There is a common issue in all four claims: what has been called “the identity issue”, namely, whether it was Dr Wright who adopted the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto when announcing the creation of the Bitcoin system. That issue will be determined at a trial fixed for hearing in January 2024.
At least he's got a couple months to 'remember' up some more evidence.
I once wrote up a more layman's explanation of the Sartre stunt on reddit, as simply as I could try to make it, including why his more modern excuses for it don't hold up either. It references your article. Hopefully anybody can follow along, even if they're not too technical:
Also, this Twitter thread by WizSec was very good, about how the double hash in Bitcoin vs OpenSSL provided the opportunity to perform the trick. I notice now it's also a response to you, which I didn't remember when I went to dig it up again to post it here. :P
>Ditto, any of us could make any number of similar fakes. It's not only not proof that he's Satoshi, it's evidence that he isn't, since he faked it and lied about it.
>Hidden under all that obfuscation and padding ("when you have nothing, you put more") is just a simple trick:
>Standard ECDSA signatures hash the message once, but Bitcoin does it twice. You can use standard tools like OpenSSL to validate a Bitcoin signature, such as Satoshi's transaction to @halfin, as long as you perform an extra step of manually hashing the message once first.
>Wright took this transaction data hashed-once and then lied by explicitly asserting it's the hash of his Sartre text. Passing this hash along with the Satoshi signature to OpenSSL will confirm it's a valid signature. But it's not his signature and it's not of the Sartre text.
>ECDSA signatures are worthless if you don't validate them all the way from the original message, which OpenSSL normally does for you. But the extra hash in Bitcoin signatures gave Wright an opportunity to perform this trivial trick of simply substituting a different hash digest.
>People like @ryancdotorg already debunked Wright's Sartre nonsense IMMEDIATELY after it was posted in 2016, and Wright is now trying to make excuses for it by saying he's just "misunderstood". Please. The intended meaning is crystal clear and the post is intrinsically fraudulent.
Hope no one here is using open source software from the UK or distributing open source software which eventually ends up in the UK--
Because the UK court of appeals thinks it's okay, in effect, if individuals located in other countries are forced to undertake millions of dollars in costs going to a full trial over a claim that they were violating the copyright of the file format of an MIT licensed piece of software, initiated by a person who (fraudulently, in this case) claims to be the initial author of the software.
At first instance the claimant here danced around disclosing that the file format was originally distributed as part of the software (presumably as it would have opened him up to having his case discarded on the basis that our use of it was unambiguously licensed)-- causing the trial court to throw out the claim on the basis that a work must be fixated in a durable form to be eligible for copyright protection. The claimant appealed, and the appeals court allowed the claim to move forward.
Recently the UK appeals court overturned a decision in another case by the same claimant where he sued a journalist for defamation for saying he wasn't Bitcoin's creator. The court found that Wright's case was willfully false and awarded only 1 pound in damages (the journalist was forced to abandon his defense due to running out of money), the appeals court concluded that the judge could not diminish damages just because of misconduct in the case.
Previously the UK appeals court overturned a dismissal in yet another case by a shell company owned by this claimant against the many of the same defendants in this latest appeal. In that case, the claimant alleged "hackers" stole 111k Bitcoin that he claims without real substantiation belong to him and that the collection of mostly-former Bitcoin developers have a fiduciary duty to add a cryptographic backdoor into the Bitcoin system to allow the claimant to "recover" these coins. The court at first instance found that he had no serious prospect of success and overturned the claim only to be overturned by the appeals court.
The UK has long been known as a popular destination for libel tourism ( https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/prigozhin-government-russia... as a recent and particularly offensive example )-- but the vulnerability to abuse is apparently not limited to libel claims.
Of course, we fully expect to win the lawsuits-- both because he's obviously not the owner/rights-holder and because the claims would still be absurd for the true owner given the statements and licensing made by the creator of the system-- but the problem is that to get there we're looking at over ten million of dollars in total costs in each case. In our case we've been able to find funding, but not every open source developer that might be targeted with these sorts of claims would be as fortunate. The fact that you can expect to ultimately win is irrelevant if you're bankrupted before you get there (as the aforementioned journalist discovered; even his reprieve on damages was overturned).
> Because the UK court of appeals thinks it's okay, in effect, if individuals located in other countries are forced to undertake millions of dollars in costs going to a full trial over a claim that they were violating the copyright of the file format of an MIT licensed piece of software, initiated by a person who (fraudulently, in this case) claims to be the initial author of the software.
Not that it would protect me against a fraud like Wright, but your story is the exact reason I have a lawyer working on licenses that would explicitly disclaim any legal duty that can be disclaimed.
The MIT license waver is extraordinarily broad, actually superior in my view to some modern licenses. From my experience now I can now see ways that it could be improved but it could be worse.
The issue with an outright fraud (or other sufficiently malicious actor) is that they can just tell sufficient lies to undermine most protections-- especially when their goal is to simply to defeat summary judgement and count on you being bankrupt before a trial could be completed.
> Recently the UK appeals court overturned a decision in another case by the same claimant where he sued a journalist
I should have said "was asked to overturn" -- I walked away from the hearing with the expectation based on the judges questions that it would be, but AFAIK it hasn't yet. Egg on my face.
If I never plan to visit the UK, then I would expect to be able to ignore the lawsuit entirely, right? Or does this represent a new threat where the US would extradite its own citizens for trial in the UK? Would some treaty bind me to a default judgement obtained in my absence?
It's a hard question. UK civil judgements are generally enforceable in the US (and in most other countries). There are specific cases where they aren't (e.g. the SPEECH act protects US persons from UK libel lawsuits) and you could fight the enforcability in your local court.
A contempt ruling wouldn't generally be enforceable outside of the country, so even if the UK would send you to prison for ignoring their civil judgement avoiding the UK can be sufficient, but because damages may be enforceable you could potentially exposed to your assets being seized. If you'll never travel to the UK and never have any assets, then maybe you'd be okay. (though, the risk that you might be imprisoned should you accidentally find yourself in the UK down the road isn't great either...).
Some of my co-defendants have raised the point that they'd worry about their future employability as a result of being in contempt, as hiring managers aren't always the most nuanced thinkers about such things.
I personally never plan to visit the UK again but the risk of bankrupting myself and my family left where I felt I couldn't ignore this.
Ironically, the tradeoff is particularly ugly when the case is the most baseless: If the claim against you was solid-- you could ignore it and lose by default, knowing that you were likely going to lose regardless. In our case it's unthinkable that we won't ultimately win, short of outright bribery/corruption. If we failed to defend it, then we were at risk of later having local courts saying "welp this is obviously unjust but procedurally our hands are tied".
> He was doubtful whether the Claimants had a real prospect of success in establishing that copyright subsisted in the Bitcoin File Format. He invited the Claimants to file further written submissions and/or evidence addressing the following question: “when and in what form the alleged literary work in the Bitcoin File Format was first recorded, in writing or otherwise”.
> In response to this question the Claimants filed a second witness statement of Dr Wright. The judge was not satisfied that this evidence established there was a serious issue to be tried, but he gave the Claimants the opportunity to persuade him otherwise at an oral hearing on 3 February 2023. Following the hearing, the judge remained unpersuaded for the reasons he explained in his judgment.
His big "win" is getting kicked to the curb because personal testimony amounts to nothing.
> There is a common issue in all four claims: what has been called “the identity issue”, namely, whether it was Dr Wright who adopted the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto when announcing the creation of the Bitcoin system. That issue will be determined at a trial fixed for hearing in January 2024.
At least he's got a couple months to 'remember' up some more evidence.