AA v Persons Unknown
Cryptoassets such as bitcoin are property under English law, so the court could grant a proprietary injunction over bitcoin paid as a ransom.
Facts
A Canadian insurance company's customer was the victim of a cyber attack, in which hackers encrypted its computer systems and demanded a ransom in bitcoin for the decryption tool. The insurer paid the ransom, worth about 950,000 US dollars, on behalf of its customer. Investigators traced part of the bitcoin to an account at the Bitfinex exchange. The insurer applied for a proprietary injunction to preserve the bitcoin, and for orders requiring the exchange to provide information about the account holders. The question was whether bitcoin could be the subject of a proprietary injunction.
Legal principle
Bryan J granted the injunction. He said that, although cryptoassets do not fit neatly within the traditional categories of things in possession and things in action, they are property under English law, because they meet the criteria for property set out in National Provincial Bank v Ainsworth, being definable, identifiable by third parties, capable in their nature of assumption by third parties and having some degree of permanence or stability. He relied on the analysis in the Legal Statement on Cryptoassets and Smart Contracts published by the UK Jurisdiction Taskforce in 2019. The decision has been followed in many later cases, and Parliament has since legislated to confirm that digital assets can be objects of personal property rights.
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- Google France SARL v Louis Vuitton Malletier SA Joined Cases C-236/08 to C-238/08, [2010] ECR I-2417
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