A year of court proceedings over the claim of an Australian-born computer scientist to have invented bitcoin culminated yesterday in Dr Craig Wright being given a suspended prison sentence for what a High Court judge described as 'a flagrant breach' of a court order.
Wright knowingly defined an anti-suit injunction by threatening and then commencing legal proceedings against a large group of bitcoin developers claiming some £912 billion for infringements of intellectual property, a committal hearing before Mr Justice Mellor heard this week.
The same judge had ruled last March that Wright's claim to be 'Satoshi Nakamoto' was false and in July imposed a court order barring Wright from any attempt to re-litigate the matter. Wright, who claims to have studied for academic qualifications in law, argued that his new actions did not rely on his being 'Satoshi'. His claims for 'extended passing off' were rather along the lines of those in the 'champagne goodwill' precedent of Bollinger v Costa Brava Wine Co (1960). Citing the doctrine of promissory estoppel, Wright maintained he was able to bring claims for breach of intellectual property rights without proving he owned those rights.
Ruling in Crypto Open Patent Alliance v Dr Craig Steven Wright yesterday, the judge, an IP specialist, described Wright's arguments as being based on 'fundamental misunderstanding'. Wright's assertion of ownership of goodwill in bitcoin was 'incoherent in its language and nonsensical in its legal reasoning', Mellor said.
Earlier, Jonathan Hough KC, for the Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA), had accused Wright of 'vexatious and opporessive' litigation. 'He has repeatedly made use of the justice system as a tool of personal vendetta,' he said. Only an immediate prison sentence would be the appropriate penalty.
Wright, who had declined to attend the initial hearing on Wednesday despite COPA's offer to pay his expenses, appeared by video at the Rolls Building yesterday. Asked if he had anything to say on the allegations of contempt, he said: 'I don't agree with the factual statements you have made on the aspects of the law, which I will be appealing.'
Asked by the judge if he was prepared to reveal his whereabouts, Wright, wearing an open-necked shirt and sitting in an apparently featureless white room, replied 'Not exactly'.
'Are you not prepared to indicate which country you are speaking from?'
'I am in Asia.'
'That's not a country.'
'I realise that.'
Finding all five of COPA's grounds of contempt proven to the criminal standard of proof, Mellor imposed a sentence of one year's imprisonment, suspended for two years. He struck out Wright's new claims and ordered him to pay COPA's costs of the application with an interim payment of £144,000 within 14 days. Meanwhile papers from the 'Satoshi identity' trial will be referred to the Crown Prosecution Service for alleged perjury.
Jonathan Hough KC and Jonathan Moss, instructed by Bird & Bird LLP, appeared for COPA. Dr Craig Wright was unrepresented and appeared by video from an undisclosed location.
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