NFT News

Bored Apes Developer Sues NFT Counterfeiter

Published

on

The corporation that is responsible for the Bored Ape Yacht Club has filed a lawsuit against conceptual artist Ryder Ripps because he sold replicas of the company’s non-fungible tokens, also known as NFTs. In the lawsuit that was submitted to a court in California over the weekend, Ripps is accused of engaging in a “calculated, planned, and willful” plot to hurt BAYC while simultaneously promoting his own work that is similar to BAYC’s.

Ripps and Yuga Labs have been in conflict with one another for a number of months, in part as a result of Ripps’ RR/BAYC NFT series. The series made use of BAYC photos, but connected them with a different cryptocurrency and sold them for the equivalent of approximately $200 each. This price was a steal in comparison to the real thing, which sells for a minimum of approximately $100,000 at the moment. “This is not some simple game of monkey see, monkey do. According to the lawsuit, this is an intentional attempt to cause injury to Yuga Labs at the cost of consumers by spreading doubt regarding whether or not these RR/BAYC NFTs are endorsed, associated, or connected to Yuga Labs’ official Bored Ape Yacht Club.

The lawsuit brings a variety of allegations against Ripps, including deceptive advertising and violation of trademark rights. It requests monetary penalties as well as a court order ordering that he stop infringing on BAYC’s work. Additionally, it requests that he be prohibited from using domain names that are “confusingly similar,” such as apemarket.com.

Ripps, who has also sold original NFTs, defined his work as a spin on appropriation art, investigating “the capacity of NFTs to shift meaning, establish provenance, and elude censorship.” Ripps’s work has also been shown in galleries and museums. He has been involved in ventures of a similar nature in the past, such as the sale of a CryptoPunk that had been subtly altered and was intended to make fun of the series. “The lawsuit grossly mischaracterizes the RR/BAYC project,” he stated in a statement that was published on Twitter. He asserted that consumers were fully advised that they weren’t purchasing an official Bored Ape product when they made their purchases.

The idea that the work was satirical criticism is one that Yuga Labs does not accept. It portrays the work as being a part of a longer-running vengeance against the corporation, against which Ripps has stated that the company is trolling its audience with racist overtones. Ripps has claimed that the BAYC series makes frequent mentions of coded white supremacist words and symbols. These include the pseudonyms of the show’s creators, the BAYC logo, and the decision to create humanoid apes, which Ripps claims is part of the larger racist tradition of comparing African Americans to apes.

The Anti-Defamation League has voiced some skepticism over his interpretations, despite the fact that he is not the first individual to make these allegations. Yuga Labs addressed the theory earlier this year, referring to it as “very unpleasant.” Additionally, Yuga Labs co-founder Gordon Goner provided a detailed response to Ripps’ charges in a blog post that was published on Medium.

Yuga has a lot more on his mind than just Ripps. A side project called the “metaverse” that was spawned by BAYC has run into some difficulties on the way to its introduction, and it is also being impacted by a larger decline in the value of the cryptocurrency market. However, because to things like a recent music video that Eminem and Snoop Dogg collaborated on to promote their album Bored Apes, it has achieved a level of prominence that most other NFT lineups have not yet achieved.

Advertisement

The work of Ripps and other copycat NFTs has brought up problems regarding the appropriate application of copyright law to cryptographic works of art. Ripps also makes mention of the fact that the terms of the BAYC copyright appear to be somewhat ambiguous and even conflicting. However, Ripps is not accused of violating any intellectual property rights in this litigation. It will therefore depend on factors such as whether Ripps was legitimately confusing people with his work — or whether people were buying into the project specifically because it wasn’t BAYC — rather than offering an early look at how courts will treat that issue. This will be the case rather than offering an early look at how courts will treat that issue.

You must be logged in to post a comment Login

Leave a Reply

Cancel reply

Trending

Exit mobile version