A court in the United Kingdom has ordered that Craig Wright’s assets worth £6 million ($7.6 million) be frozen. This action was taken to make sure Wright can’t avoid paying the court costs associated with his most recent legal struggle. Craig Wright, claiming to be the anonymous creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, was recently involved in a legal battle with the Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA).
United Kingdom court freezes Craig Wright’s assets
Wright recently transferred assets outside of the United Kingdom following his loss in the legal battle, which also contributed to the verdict. An entity in Singapore received certain shares of Wright’s London-based company, RCJBR Holding, on March 18, according to a court document from the United Kingdom. The behaviour raised enough doubts about whether Wright was attempting to avoid the repercussions of his trial defeat.
According to the document, Judge Hames Mellor approved the order freezing Craig Wright’s assets globally after COPA raised the red flag. During the trial, COPA paid almost $8 million in court costs. COPA was established in 2020 with the goal of fostering innovation and use of cryptocurrencies while removing obstacles to the industry’s expansion.
Crypto industry titans Coinbase, Block, MicroStrategy, Uniswap, Paradigm, Worldcoin, and Meta are among its members. Craig Wright has used his assertions that he is Bitcoin’s founder, Satoshi Nakamoto, behind pseudonyms to protect copyrights on projects pertaining to the cryptocurrency.
COPA’s lawsuit and copyright challenges
Craig Wright filed litigation, among other things, to have the Bitcoin white paper taken down from two websites by 2021. COPA brought him before the court in April 2021, contesting his copyright assertions that he was Satoshi Nakamoto and the creator of Bitcoin. Wright was found not to be Satoshi Nakamoto by the court based on the testimony of early Bitcoin developers.
Craig Wright filed thirteen separate lawsuits against several cryptocurrency platforms last year, claiming that the Bitcoin white paper violated his copyright. A few of the businesses named in the complaint were Block, Coinbase, and Blockstream. The Bitcoin Legal Defence Fund expressed its concerns about the tendency of pursuing influential figures in the Bitcoin space in its response.
In addition to the anxiety and significant costs brought on by the legal actions, there is a chance that the evolution of the Bitcoin ecosystem could be disturbed. Even though Wright filed a copyright claim to the Bitcoin white paper in the US, anyone can now use it to change the code. Craig Wright would also be prohibited from asserting any copyright on the white paper by another order against him.
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