Bored Ape’s wildly popular non-fungible token (NFT) maker, Yuga Labs, recently won a case against impersonator Ryder Ripps.
Yuga Labs won on all counts, according to court documents.
Yuga Labs gets the final victory
The legal drag that began last summer seems to have turned on its face Yuga Lab s.
The creator of the largest non-fungible token (NFT) ecosystem, which includes the famous Bored Ape Yacht Club, recently defeated Ryder Ripps and his cohorts.
According to court documents Yuga Labs won a case against copies of Bored Ape’s digital collection regarding the cause of infringement.
The U.S. District Court for the Northern District agreed with the prosecution’s position that the RRBAYC collection, created by Ryder Ripps and Jeremy Kaehen, was intended to do more than highlight the irregularities in Yuga Labs’ NFT collection.
Instead, it found that the defendant’s use of the BAYC trademark was not fair use or proper artistic expression as alleged.
Before that was over, the court also sided with Yuga Labs, ruling that the copycats had committed false attribution and that the defendant’s free speech claims were ineligible in this case.
Given this, the court called the RRBAYC NFT collection malicious, and the US District Court said it was for profit.
The court also stated that NFT markets with the domain names apemarket.com and rrbayc.com were cybersquatting and that the apparent similarity to the Bored Ape project could easily lead to public confusion.
The basis of the trial in favor Yuga Labs was that Ryder Ripps only registered the domain names after the company launched the BAYC NFT collection.
The court also stated that the defendants attempted to deliberately portray the BAYC collection in a bad light in order to misrepresent it.
Since the court documents were released, the NFT has sparked outrage.
According to entertainment and intellectual property attorney Ash Kernen, Esq, Yuga Labs’ victory is a complete knockout for the defendants.
Other NFT enthusiasts also praised the court’s decision. Yuga Labs copyright and trademark attorney Jessica Neer MacDonald called the court’s ruling a “huge victory.”
However, not everything went in favor of Yuga Labs. According to the court’s decision, the producers of the Otherdeed metaverse must wait for the court to file a claim for damages.
NFTs are commodities, not securities
A recent infringement victory claimed by Yuga Labs appears to have answered questions about a controversial topic that has been troubling NFT investors.
In a court document, the Northern District Court of California made it clear that NFTs are commodities and should not be treated as securities.
The court stated that the defendant’s claims that the BAYC collection is not a tangible good do not elevate it above recognition as such in the Langham Act.
The court then ruled that NFTs were virtual goods, not securities; therefore, presenting the project to Ripps without proper approval from Yuga Labs was a gross legal error on their part.
While this may seem minor, NFT advocates have taken it down, arguing that the court’s ruling clarifies whether these virtual collections are securities.
The Yuga Labs team said the summary judgment was a landmark victory for the Web3 space.
This is a positive trend for a project whose sales have fallen over the past 90 days.
After claims by Ripps and his associates that the collection contained hidden Nazi symbols and that they intended to ridicule it, the global popularity of the NFT project has since declined.
