In ~2022 myself and a dozen other former and current volunteer Bitcoin contributors were sued in the UK by a shell company controlled by a fraudster/imposter.

The plaintiff alleged that they had 'lost' (through no fault or negligence of ours) in a 'hack' the private keys to some $4 billion dollars in Bitcoins and that we owed them tortuous and/or fiduciary duties to aid them in "recovering" these assets.

Our position was that there wasn't anything we could do to help, that even if there were we had no obligation to do so, owing to the fact the software we published was MIT licensed with a forceful disclaimer of liability which the plaintiff had accepted and without which we wouldn't have allowed the plaintiff to use or redistribute the software we wrote and the fact that normally no one has an active duty to save another (e.g. a police officer can stand holding a life preserver as you drown, and finally that their claim of ownership was obviously fraudulent.

(plaintiff's position was that we could help by publishing backdoored software, we were never able to pin them down how how we were supposed to force anyone to adopt it in order to give it any effect at all, among other issues)

We originally succeeded at getting the case tossed as having no reasonable prospect of success, but the dismissal was overturned by the appeals court.

Fortunately (???) the fraudster behind the claim brought an additional spurious claim against us (this time demanding hundreds of billions in damages) during the brief window before the initial dismissal was overturned. Owing to a spectacular tactical blunder by our opponent the new case was joined in with other cases involving him which were more advanced in their development, and we were able to factually destroy all of the evidence that his initial case used to show his ownership as a collateral effect.

All in all our litigation cost millions of dollars, tens of millions in for all parties across all the related cases. Fortunately good actors in the Bitcoin space stood up to pay our costs or otherwise we would have been personally ruined long before successfully winning the case on its merits, which was presumably his strategy. -- this is a thing often missed in these discussions: that it doesn't matter so much if you would ultimately win when if you can't immediately get a summary dismissal the legal costs will ruin you long before you get that opportunity. Not every project has supporters as wealthy as ours.

Unfortunately, we had essentially no support from the free software legal or online rights world. I hope we avoided the precedent created by the initial reversal trashing things up for the future, time will tell. I was disappointed by parties who denied us support out of ick at anything cryptocurrency... when it comes to defending civil liberties you can't necessarily pick who you defend. There is a lot of good free speech law in the US thanks to the deplorable people at the Westboro Baptist Church.

Our case was in the UK even though none of the defendants were there and many were in the US, because that's where the plaintiff brought it. Unfortunately when you write software that's used world wide you're potentially exposed to the systems of other countries, at least ones your own country will domesticate judgements from, regardless of your desires. (and perhaps an absence of choice of venue clauses is a defect in popular licenses...)