Bitcoin Copyright

When the Bitcoin code was first posted on SourceForge, it was released under the MIT License with the following:

Copyright (c) 2009 Satoshi Nakamoto

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

Unfortunately, many of the existing current versions of Bitcoin software no longer include the necessary line:

Copyright (c) 2009 Satoshi Nakamoto

For example, Bitcoin Unlimited has only the following lines:

Copyright (c) 2009-2016 The Bitcoin Core developers
Copyright (c) 2015-2017 The Bitcoin Unlimited developers

Bitcoin Copyright
Bitcoin Unlimited Copyright Notice

Most egregiously, the so-called “Bitcoin Core” developers did not even exist in 2009, yet they are being given credit for the code work of those early years.