For the MIT license to make sense it needs a copyright notice, I don’t actually see one in the original license. It just says “The MIT license” but then the text below references the above copyright notice, which doesn’t exist.

I think both sides here can learn from this, copyright notices are technically not required but when some text references them it is very useful. The original author should have added one. The user of the code could also have asked about the copyright. If this were to go to court having the original license not making sense could create more questions than it should.

tl;dr: add a copyright line at the top of the file when you’re using the MIT license.