Craig Wright, the chief scientist at nChain and self-proclaimed Satoshi Nakamoto, has been a vocal critic of plagiarism, calling it an act of criminal fraud. But, it turns out that the adamant critic has plagiarized most of his 2008 Masters of Laws dissertation, copying entire paragraphs verbatim from several scientific papers.
Evidence shows Wright plagiarized his dissertation
Craig Wright, the chief scientist at nChain notorious for claiming he created Bitcoin, is back in the news this week, but this time it doesn’t have anything to do with his ongoing trial with Ira Kleiman.
This time, it’s Wright’s masters dissertation that initiated the controversy.
According to a report published on Medium, the majority of his dissertation, written in 2008, has been plagiarized. His dissertation, titled “The Impact of Internet Intermediary Liability,” was published in February that year. A user behind the report went deep into the 90-page paper Wright wrote to gain his postgrad academic law degree in international commercial law at the University of Northumbria.
“The work is heavily plagiarized. Much of the text is taken—both in paraphrase and verbatim form—from other works with no credit given,” the report found.
Wright appropriated the majority of the text from the “Liability of Internet Service Providers” paper by Hilary Pearson, published in 1996. The report found that Wright copied Pearson’s opening paragraphs word-for-word in the introduction to his dissertation.
Rewording is still plagiarism
While the report noted that the majority of the material it deemed “plagiarized” was reworded rather than copied, the fact remains that Wright appropriated 45 paragraphs out of Pearson’s 58-paragraph paper. The report also found that Wright reworded sections of another one of Pearson’s works.
The dissertation listed Ronald Mann and Seth Belzley’s 2005 paper “The Promise of Internet Intermediary Liability” as a source. However, further inspection showed that not only Wright borrowed a large amount of text, he also blatantly copied the paper’s footnotes.
Part II of Wright’s dissertation also relies heavily on text reworded from Mann and Belzley’s paper, which is shown in the image below.
Apart from a couple of other scientific papers from the early 2000s, Wright also reworded content from Wikipedia without giving proper attribution.
While plagiarism in academic circles isn’t anything new, Wright’s own attitude towards attributing content makes this a bigger deal than it would otherwise be. Back in 2011, Wright wrote a lengthy, two-part blog post focusing on the dangers and criminality of plagiarism.
“In this “uniquely secretive form of theft,” the author is asserting a level of skill, knowledge, and expertise that they do not exhibit on their own. They are using the work and study of another to lift their own lack of ability,” he wrote in the blog.
Back in 2008, he called plagiarism “a criminal breach of the copyright act” and “criminal fraud.” He is yet to comment on the allegations.
