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Australian 'Bitcoin Founder' Quietly Bidding For Patent Empire (reuters.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Craig Wright, the Australian who claimed to be the inventor of bitcoin, is attempting to build a large patent portfolio around the digital currency and technology underpinning it, according to associates of his and documents reviewed by Reuters. Since February, Wright has filed more than 50 patent applications in Britain through Antigua-registered EITC Holdings Ltd, which a source close to the company confirmed was connected to Wright, government records show. Interviews with sources close to EITC Holdings Ltd, which has two of Wright's associates as directors, confirmed it was still working on filing patent applications and Britain's Intellectual Property Office has published another 11 patent applications filed by the company in the past week. The granting of even some of the patents would be significant for banking and other industries that are trying to exploit bitcoin technologies, as well as dozens of start-ups scurrying to build business models based around it. Patents that Wright has applied for range from a mechanism for paying securely for online content to an operating system for running an "internet of things" on blockchain. A patent schedule, one of a number of documents relating to the applications shown to Reuters by a person close to the EITC Holdings, outlines plans to apply for about 400 in total.
Trying to lure out the real Satoshi, are we?
The real satoshi has a mathematically incontrovertible signature he can use to sign and publish messages to the world, so there is no need to lure that person out. The original also, intentionally, released and spread his paper and code, and distributed efforts throughout a community for both development and adoption, which would indicate any claims of infringement to copyright (the validly applicable area of law, unlike patents, which would cover inventions in the computing machine or some other hardware, but not mere instructions).
More interesting is what happens if Wright gets legally recognized: I say freeze his accounts and assets, and then demand that he move sufficient bitcoin to cover the back-dues in tax and penalties. If he can't, or the money comes from elsewhere (rather than Satoshi moving his chunk of the blockchain and converting into cash), then we know he is either a psychopathic, entrepeneurial conman, or the face of a government operation to try to engineer its way into owning and controlling bitcoin via legal grants and decree.
He chose to publish instead. You can't patent something you've already publicly described. And no one else can either.
This assumes the patent office is a rational actor following the law of course.