Craig Wright barred from further Satoshi lawsuits

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

Dr. Craig Wright has been barred from launching further suits which assert his claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto, pseudonymous inventor of Bitcoin, according to a judgment released by Justice James Mellor today.

The judgment contained rulings on several injunctions that were requested by the Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA) following their victory in March’s blockbuster Satoshi identity trial. There, Justice Mellor ruled that Dr. Wright was not the pseudonymous inventor of Bitcoin.

In addition to being prevented from launching further Satoshi suits, Dr. Wright was barred from threatening (implicitly or explicitly) to do so.

However, other injunctions requested by COPA were denied by Justice Mellor. These included requests that Dr. Wright be prevented from asserting his claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto more generally and from publishing any statements to the same effect. While Justice Mellor noted that any right to freedom of expression holds little weight in cases of false statements, he ruled that to the extent that such assertions are not captured by the injunctions that were granted, they would likely be seen as ‘empty rhetoric’ following the outcome of trial.

Mellor also rejected COPA’s request that Dr. Wright be forced to publish a notice regarding the outcome of the identity trial in The Times. This is ostensibly a retort to Dr. Wright’s pre-trial settlement offer, which was published in The Times before trial, which itself was an allusion to the Bitcoin Genesis block which contains reference to an article published in The Times.

“I have no doubt that I should not order Dr. Wright to publish the half-page notice in the Times. That does appear to be a somewhat vindictive response to his half-page publication of his offer,” wrote Justice Mellor.

Mellor did order that Dr. Wright host a notice of the judgment on his own website (for six months) and on his Twitter feed and Slack channels (for three months).

Justice Mellor also rejected COPA’s request that the Court force Dr. Wright to disclose his funding arrangements. To justify this, COPA had argued that as the security previously put up by Dr. Wright do not cover their legal costs (said to be in excess of £5.5 million). Justice Mellor declined this, noting that Dr. Wright had met all of his costs deadlines to date (including full payment made to the BTC Core defendants) and that forcing Dr. Wright to make disclosures about his funding before he has defaulted on his obligations would provide no additional coercive effect on Dr. Wright.

Justice Mellor also responded to COPA’s requests that he refer Dr. Wright and two of his witnesses—Stefan Matthews and David Bridges—to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) for consideration of criminal charges. In the judgment, Justice Mellor refers both Dr. Wright and Stefan Matthews to the CPS. For Dr. Wright, Justice Mellor said that by lying to the court “extensively and repeatedly” and forging documents on “a grand scale,” Dr Wright had committed a “most serious abuse of the process of the courts of the UK, Norway and the USA.”

For Stefan Matthews, who testified that Dr. Wright had given him a draft copy of the Bitcoin White Paper before its release to the public, Justice Mellor said that this story was a lie which served as ‘a very important prop’ for Dr. Wright’s claims.

Today’s judgment was the last significant shoe left to drop in the COPA v Wright trial. The full costs bill that must be paid by Dr. Wright has yet to be finalized, as has any potential appeal by the computer scientist. On any potential appeal, Justice Mellor noted that Dr. Wright has not asked his Court for permission to do so—though it’s important to note that Dr. Wright can apply for permission from the Court of Appeal directly. He has 21 days from today to do so.

Check out all of the CoinGeek’s special reports on the Satoshi Trial (COPA v Wright).