No trillion-dollar payday
UK judge issues 1-year suspended prison sentence as Wright hides in Asia.
Craig Wright, the man who claims he invented bitcoin and has been filing lawsuits asserting intellectual property rights, was sentenced to a year in prison yesterday for committing contempt of court.
The sentence is suspended and can be enforced if Wright continues violating court rulings—but he may be able to avoid imprisonment by staying away from countries that have extradition agreements with the UK. Wright defied an order to attend a court hearing in person this week and said he is in Asia.
Wright “was sentenced for contempt of court on Thursday” for bringing a 911 billion pound ($1.1 trillion) lawsuit “against Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s payments company Block in Britain,” Reuters wrote.
Wright filed that lawsuit in October. In addition to Block, which operates the Square payment service, Wright’s lawsuit targeted numerous corporate entities and individuals involved in bitcoin development. The ruling this week by Justice James Mellor of England’s High Court of Justice said that Wright cannot pursue that lawsuit without violating previous court orders.
Sentence suspended for two years
Mellor ruled earlier this year that Wright is not bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto and that his evidence “is fabricated and/or based on documents I am satisfied have been forged on a grand scale by Dr. Wright.” In July, Mellor referred Wright to prosecutors to consider criminal charges of perjury and forgery.
Mellor issued a written judgment against Wright this week, finding that he committed the contempts alleged by the Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA). A BBC report described a hearing yesterday in which the sentence was issued:
In March, the High Court ruled Craig Wright was not Satoshi, and ordered him to stop claiming he was. However, he continued to launch legal cases asserting he had intellectual property rights to Bitcoin… A judge said that amounted to a “flagrant breach” of the original court order and sentenced him to 12 months in prison, suspended for two years. It means if Wright—who is from Australia but lives in the UK—continues to claim he invented the cryptocurrency he will face being jailed.
Because Wright is staying out of the UK, “an international arrest warrant would have to be issued if the UK authorities wanted to detain him,” the BBC wrote.
Wright skipped contempt hearing
Wright skipped a contempt hearing scheduled for Wednesday despite Mellor ordering him to attend in person. COPA offered to fund his travel costs, but Wright claimed in emails cited in Mellor’s ruling “that this offer does not cover even a fraction of the true costs associated with my attendance,” which apparently included a business contract he was pursuing. Wright said the “funding required to accommodate these expenses would be £240,000, calculated as £40,000 per month for the next six months. This reflects the lost contract and the financial requirements to address the situation.”
Mellor determined that Wright “puts his business interests ahead of attending the Contempt Hearing and ahead of complying with my Order that he must attend in person.” The judge went ahead with sentencing after concluding that “an adjournment would only result in wasted costs and wasted Court time.”
“I regard his estimate of loss to be grossly exaggerated since, given he had more than 6 weeks’ notice of this hearing, it is very difficult to understand why he could not have arranged his affairs so as to enable him to attend. Overall his emails sent during the morning of 18 December indicate to me that he was going to continue to come up with every possible excuse not to attend,” Mellor wrote.
Wright reportedly appeared on Thursday via a video connection and said he was in Asia without disclosing any more specific location. Mellor said during the hearing that Wright’s “arguments were ‘legal nonsense’ but acknowledged that he was not in the UK and ‘appears to be well aware of countries with which the UK does not have extradition arrangements,'” according to the BBC.
Wright “invented” a defendant
Mellor’s written judgment noted that in his previous order, he “granted some wide-ranging anti-suit and anti-threat injunctions against Dr. Wright.” Wright violated those injunctions with his latest lawsuit against Square and other defendants, Mellor found.
Wright’s lawsuit names a defendant he calls “BTC Core,” which apparently doesn’t exist. Wright alleges that BTC Core “partners” include 122 corporate entities and 22 individuals who contributed to bitcoin development and research. Wright also named BTC Core as a defendant in a 2022 lawsuit.
This week’s court ruling said that “COPA (and others) say there is no such entity and it is an invention of Dr. Wright’s in his attempt to designate those who are or who have been involved in the development of the software used in various manifestations of Bitcoin as a partnership. They deny there is any such partnership, as Dr. Wright seems to allege. It is not necessary to resolve that issue.”
Corporations and individuals that Wright claims are part of BTC Core “were defendants to various of the previous actions brought by Dr. Wright (and his companies),” Mellor wrote.
Wright suit “repeat[s] his dishonest claim to be Satoshi”
Wright contended that his lawsuit falls outside the bounds of the previous order because his new claims “do not involve him claiming to be Satoshi Nakamoto and do not depend on him having invented the Bitcoin system,” Mellor wrote. Mellor rejected Wright’s arguments.
For one thing, Mellor said the earlier order “is not limited to prohibiting claims dependent on Dr. Wright asserting that he is Satoshi Nakamoto.” For another, Mellor pointed out that Wright’s latest lawsuit “does include pleaded contentions that he is Satoshi Nakamoto,” and thus “Dr. Wright is wrong to say that his New Claim does not repeat his dishonest claim to be Satoshi.”
Further, COPA contended “that each of the principal claims in the New Claim can only be maintained by Dr. Wright asserting intellectual property rights which the Order precludes him from asserting in legal proceedings.”
Addressing Wright’s copyright claim, Mellor wrote that “Dr. Wright does not claim a license or any assignment from some other person alleged to be owner of copyright in the relevant works. Therefore Dr. Wright cannot bring this claim for copyright infringement without claiming ownership of the rights which he alleges to have been infringed. That is to say, Dr. Wright cannot bring an infringement claim in relation to the works in question, however it is worded, without breaching the Order.”
Jon is a Senior IT Reporter for Ars Technica. He covers the telecom industry, Federal Communications Commission rulemakings, broadband consumer affairs, court cases, and government regulation of the tech industry.
