Readers who have followed the long-running saga of COPA v Wright may have noticed that I made a minor cameo appearance in it. Not as a witness, not as counsel, and certainly not as a party, but as the supposed conduit through which Mr Justice Mellor was said to have been infected with bias against Dr Wright. Now that the dust has settled, it seems worth setting out, for the record, what was alleged and how it was dealt with. As ever, the best way to do this is to let the documents speak for themselves: the transcript of the CMC on 27 November 2024 (which I attended), the affidavit of Gavin Mehl sworn on 9 December 2024, and the judgment on contempt handed down on 19 December 2024 ([2024] EWHC 3315 (Ch)).
The background, briefly
Following the Identity Issue trial in February and March 2024, Mellor J announced on 14 March 2024 that Dr Wright was not Satoshi Nakamoto, giving full reasons in the Main Judgment that followed on 20 May 2024 ([2024] EWHC 1198 (Ch)). His subsequent Order of 16 July 2024 included wide-ranging anti-suit and anti-threat injunctions preventing Dr Wright from bringing (or threatening) proceedings based on, among other things, being Satoshi or owning goodwill, copyright or database rights in various parts of the Bitcoin system.
On 10 October 2024, Dr Wright issued a new claim against "BTC Core (a Partnership)" and SquareUp Europe Ltd, valued by him at a modest £911,050,000,000. COPA applied to have him committed for contempt. A CMC was held on 27 November 2024 to sort out the arrangements for the contempt hearing, which was listed for 18 and 19 December.
It is worth noting that the question of whether Mellor J should carry on dealing with all this was not first raised by Dr Wright. In its skeleton argument for an earlier CMC on 1 November 2024, COPA itself thought it right, given that Dr Wright was no longer legally represented, to put the question to the court. COPA pointed out that Dr Wright had already alleged judicial bias in his appeal documents, essentially on the basis that findings against him were in themselves evidence of bias. The answer, COPA submitted, lay in Otkritie v Urumov [2014] EWCA Civ 1315, where Longmore LJ explained that bias is not to be imputed to a judge because of his previous rulings in the same case, and that judges should "resist the temptation" to recuse themselves when a party they have found against complains about them hearing later applications. Any other judge would have had to spend a great deal of time reading in, and the contempt application turned largely on the scope of an Order that Mellor J had made himself. So the allegation, when it came, was hardly a surprise.
27 November 2024: the "Threats" document
Most of the November CMC was taken up with whether Dr Wright should be allowed to attend the contempt hearing by video link from somewhere in South-East Asia (spoiler: he wasn't). Towards the end, however, the judge turned to a section at the end of a document Dr Wright had filed entitled "Threats". At page 17 of that document was a heading: "Mellor affiliation with David Pearce /COPA".
Dr Wright's own skeleton argument for the hearing did not, as such, allege bias. It was mostly concerned with safety, his ASD and why he should be allowed to attend by video link, although a section near the end complained of the court's "failure to address threats by members of COPA". The material about me was in a separate document.
Asked about it, Dr Wright said he had not put it together himself but had asked some people to do it for him, who turned out to be "the Metanet people" (presumably Joel Dalais, a long-time fan of Wright). The judge pointed out that, even if Dr Wright was not alleging bias, he had to treat it as an allegation of bias. Dr Wright's explanation of the allegation was, in its entirety:
I do not know all the details, but I have been pointed out that David Pearce and yourself know each other, and I also know David Pearce has a direct interest in COPA. That is all I know, my Lord.
Quite what that "direct interest" was supposed to be was not explained, then or since.
The judge then set out, in open court, the two occasions on which he had met me. The first was at a Union-IP event in Munich in February 2023, a year before the Identity trial, at which he had no recollection of me telling him anything about Bitcoin. The second was on 29 April 2024, at a CIPA event entitled "UK patent drafting and litigation – myth, legend & reality", where he had been one of a panel of judges. At the event, as the judge recalled, I said something like "Adam Back wants to know when the judgment is coming out" (a reference to this tweet from Dr Back). The judge said he was aiming for 9 May. The draft judgment went out to the parties on 10 May and was handed down on 20 May. He said he would reject "in no uncertain terms" any allegation of apparent bias.
Mr Hough KC, for COPA, added a point the judge had forgotten: at the various WFO hearings the judge had been quite open with the parties about how he was getting on with the judgment, so telling me roughly when it would arrive was not a departure from what he had been doing in court anyway. The judge's state of knowledge about the timing of his own judgment was, in other words, not exactly a closely guarded secret.
The typo
I was live-reporting the hearing on X at the time, as I had done for several days of the trial. In one of those posts I attributed the following to the judge:
Mellor: I met him at the COPA event. He did ask about when the judgment was coming out. I did say I was aiming for May 9. Draft Judgment was sent out on May 10. I reject in no uncertain terms any allegations of bias.
The observant reader will notice that "COPA" should, of course, have been "CIPA". One letter. On a QWERTY keyboard, O and I sit next to each other. Once this was pointed out, I corrected the typo in a subsequent post. As we shall see, that one mistyped letter turned out to be the only thing in the subsequent recusal application that the judge considered to be new.
In my defence, I am not the only one in this case to have had trouble with identifiers. Dr Wright's witness statement of 24 October 2024, responding to the contempt application, describes in some detail the care he took to make sure his new claim complied with the Order. Throughout, it refers to that claim as being under Claim No. IL-2021-000019, which is the number of COPA's claim against him, rather than his own claim (BL-2024-001495). It also tells us that his legal research to ensure compliance with the Order of 16 July 2024 began on 2 April 2021, more than three years before the Order was made. Thoroughness, it seems, can be taken too far.
29 November 2024: the Court of Appeal
Two days later, Arnold LJ refused Dr Wright permission to appeal against the Identity trial orders as totally without merit, in an order sealed on 29 November 2024. The same allegations had featured there too, as an application to adduce fresh evidence, and were disposed of in a few lines:
Materials concerning David Pearce (F): All this evidence shows is that (i) the judge discussed the time when he hoped to be in position to hand down the judgment with Mr Pearce at a social event some time before 9 May 2024 and (ii) the judge has had other conversations with Mr Pearce about other topics. Given that the judge had already announced his decision on 14 March 2024, (i) does not begin to demonstrate an appearance of bias, let alone actual bias. Nor would it have done so even if the judge had not already not announced his decision. As for (ii) this is wholly irrelevant, particularly given that Mr Pearce was not a witness.
Arnold LJ was no kinder to the wider allegation of bias in Dr Wright's 59 grounds of appeal. He described it as baseless: there was no credible allegation of either actual or apparent bias, only a series of disagreements with the judge's reasoning, and in fact the judge had "leant over backwards" to ensure that Dr Wright received a fair trial. He also noted, in passing, that Dr Wright's appeal papers relied on fictitious authorities which appeared to be AI-generated hallucinations. Against that, a one-letter typo seems a fairly minor sin.
Mellor J then dealt with the allegations in his judgment following the CMC, handed down on 6 December 2024 ([2024] EWHC 3135 (Ch) at [67]-[81]), and rejected them. That, one might have thought, would be that.
9 December 2024: the Mehl affidavit
It was not. On 11 December 2024 Dr Wright filed a "Motion for Judicial Recusal" supported by an affidavit from Gavin Mehl, who had followed the trial remotely and reported on it on YouTube, and who had interviewed me on three occasions.
The affidavit is worth reading in full, if only as an exercise in how a small number of facts can be made to look like a big conspiracy. It draws on my interviews with Mr Mehl, my live-tweets from the CMC, Arnold LJ's order and the 6 December judgment, and then adds a further chapter about a change.org petition calling for an investigation into "potential judicial bias surrounding Judge Mellor's and Judge Arnold's decisions", which had reached 700 signatures before being taken down (thanks to me).
A few points stand out.
First, the "COPA event". The affidavit reproduced my typo and treated it as evidence that the judge "initially claimed to have met Mr. Pearce 'at the COPA event'" before changing his account "without explanation" to a Union-IP event. Curiously, elsewhere the affidavit described the photograph on the petition as showing the judge and me talking "at the 2024 COPA/CIPA event", which suggests some awareness that the letters might have been jumbled somewhere along the way. By the time of the conclusions, however, the uncertainty had gone and it was simply a "COPA event". The affidavit also conflated the two events entirely: the Union-IP dinner in February 2023 and the CIPA seminar in April 2024 were some 15 months apart.
Second, a quote from one of my interviews, given on 21 March 2024, in which I said that I had previously admitted to being biased, having already decided that Craig was not Satoshi. That interview took place a week after the judge had announced, in open court, that Craig was not Satoshi. Holding a view on the outcome of a trial that has already been decided is not, I would suggest, much of a confession. I was a member of the public sitting at the back of the court and writing about it, not the judge.
Third, Union-IP. The affidavit makes much of the organisation's description of its roundtable events as an opportunity for practitioners to hear from authoritative speakers and influence them. That is, as far as I can tell, a description of nearly every professional conference ever held. Judges speak at them; practitioners listen and ask awkward questions. That is rather the point.
Fourth, Jack Dorsey. The affidavit exhibits a change.org page showing Mr Dorsey as a "Decision Maker", and concludes that the removal of the petition occurred through an organisation where a founding member of COPA "holds a position of authority". A glance at the exhibit itself shows that it is change.org's standard page for the target of petitions, describing him as "Twitter and Square CEO" in what the page labels as AI-generated content and listing "Petitions directed towards Jack Dorsey", including one asking Twitter to close the account of the President of Colombia. Being the person a petition is addressed to does not, as far as I am aware, give you the power to delete it.
And as a small aside for those who enjoy such things, the affidavit's quotation from the 6 December judgment refers to the Union IP Roundtable having taken place on "Friday, 24 February 2024", when the surrounding text makes clear that the event was in February 2023. Typos, it seems, are not confined to cats.
19 December 2024: the judgment
The judge dealt with the recusal application at the start of his judgment on contempt, at [5]-[16]. Having reviewed the affidavit carefully, he found that the only relevant and material new piece of information was my post on X. On that, he said:
This post contained what I assume to be an unfortunate typographical error. The second occasion when I encountered David Pearce was at a CIPA event, as related in [80] of my 6 December 2024 judgment. It was not a COPA event. I have never attended any COPA event.
I can confirm that the judge's assumption was correct. He added, for completeness:
For the avoidance of any doubt, I have never attended any 'COPA/CIPA event', nor do I believe that any such event has ever been held.
And then came the passage that was much quoted at the time:
Although Mr Mehl concludes his Affidavit by identifying 'patterns that create a real possibility of bias' I note that every 'fact' or 'pattern' on which he relies is exaggerated, sometimes grotesquely. In short, having considered all his allegations with great care, the best way to characterise his 'Motion for recusal' is that it amounts to taking 2+2, adding a great deal of unsupported supposition and making 256, in circumstances where the actual facts add up to 4 and reveal no hint or appearance of bias.
On the petition, the judge observed at [15] that 700 signatures provided no support for the allegation of bias when the signatories, assuming each of them exists, had not had access to the facts. He rejected the allegation once again and certified it as totally without merit.
And then the main event
The recusal application having been disposed of, there remained the small matter of the contempt hearing itself. Dr Wright had been ordered to attend in person. At 9.39am on 18 December, 51 minutes before the hearing was due to start, he emailed the judge's clerk to say that he did not presently have the means to be in the UK. Bird & Bird offered to pay his air fare. Dr Wright replied that this did not cover even a fraction of the true costs, and when asked what would, he named a figure of £240,000, being £40,000 a month for six months. He added that even with that funding he could not commit to answering questions under oath, nor could he feasibly travel.
The judge, applying the factors in Sanchez v Oboz [2015] EWHC 235 (Fam), proceeded in his absence. He observed, drily, that the six-month figure would make sense if Dr Wright was working on the basis that he might be imprisoned for six months or more. All five grounds of contempt were found proved beyond reasonable doubt: that the new claim was based on ownership of goodwill in the name Bitcoin, on database rights in the Bitcoin Blockchain, on copyright in the White Paper, file format and software, and on Dr Wright being Satoshi, and that his posts on X the day before issuing it amounted to threats of Precluded Proceedings. Along the way the judge noted that there is no such thing as a claim in promissory estoppel, and that Dr Wright's "reciprocal database right" appears to be "a figment of his imagination".
The same witness statement explained that, having discussed the matter with lawyers, barristers and legal scholars, Dr Wright was confident that a "champagne" passing off claim, following Bollinger v Costa Brava, was about protecting consumers from misrepresentation and did not involve asserting ownership of anything. The judge was rather less confident. As he explained at [40]-[42], even in an extended passing off case each claimant must prove that he owns goodwill, and a claimant who says he is not claiming any of it has a claim that is bound to fail. In any event, the new claim as pleaded said in terms that Dr Wright was the owner of goodwill in the name "Bitcoin", which rather settled the matter.
Lessons
What, if anything, is to be learned from all this? A few things occur to me.
First, if you are going to live-tweet a hearing in which you yourself are being discussed, check your acronyms. One letter can go a surprisingly long way.
Second, a judge telling someone at a drinks reception roughly when a judgment will be ready, after the result has already been announced in open court, is not evidence of anything other than a judge being polite at a drinks reception.
Third, and more seriously, the judge dealt with all of this in exactly the right way: by setting out the facts openly, in court and in writing, and then deciding the question on those facts rather than on what had been built on top of them. That is how allegations of bias should be handled, and it is the reason why 2+2 still makes 4.
Postscript: Readers may have noticed that Hollywood has got in on the act. Bitcoin (originally Killing Satoshi), directed by Doug Liman, has Casey Affleck as Dr Wright and Pete Davidson as Calvin Ayre, who is reportedly helping to fund it. It is said to follow a man trying to prove he created Bitcoin while surviving assassination attempts and fending off tech billionaires, among them an AI-generated Jack Dorsey. Anyone who has read this far will recognise the plot: it is more or less the "Threats" document, with a bigger budget. There is no distributor or release date yet. Whether the screenplay finds room for a patent attorney with a typo problem remains to be seen. In the meantime, the judgments are free to read.
