The United District Court for the Central District of California granted NFT giant Yuga Labs a resounding victory over Ryder Ripps, the inventor of the Bored Ape Yacht Club (“BAYC”) fraud, on December 16, 2022. Rejecting the Reps’ Motions to Dismiss and Anti-SLAPP. The court predicted a difficult path ahead for Ripps, rejecting his claim that his initiative was an artistic expression and stating that his selling of NFTs was “no more creative than the sale of counterfeit handbags.”
Era Labs is the inventor of BAYC, “one of the most famous and lucrative NFT collections in the world,” and owns numerous trademarks linked to BAYC. Ripps self-identifies as a “conceptual artist” and is a vocal critic of Yuga Labs. In May 2022, Ripps released his own NFT compilation titled Rider Ripps Bored Ape Yacht Club (shortened as “RR/BAYC”). The ownership of both collections is documented on the Ethereum blockchain, with RR/BAYC NFTs pointing to the same digital artwork files as BAYC NFTs.
Era Labs sued Ripps and his partner on July 24, 2022, citing several trademark-related allegations under the Lanham Act as well as other causes of action. The defendants filed a claim under California’s anti-SLAPP statute and a motion to dismiss the motion to strike, which is “strategic lawsuits against public partnerships, or certain actions known as SLAPPs.” provides for pre-trial dismissals that are ‘pretended as ordinary trials’ but are intended to prevent ordinary people from exercising their political or legal rights or being punished for doing so. The essence of the motions was that RR/BAYC NFTs should be protected as creative expressions and critiques of Yuga Labs.
first The court didn’t agree with Ripps’ claim that the RR/BAYC NFTs are works of art that should pass the free speech test for trademark use. The court came to the conclusion that “selling RR/BAYC NFTs is no more artistic than selling fake handbags, so the Rogers test doesn’t work.” The court also said that even if the Rogers test was used, Rips failed it because RR/ BAYC’s use of the BAYC marks was not “artistically relevant” and (b) “manifestly misleading.”
Second, the court said that Ripps’ use of the BAYC marks was not “nominally” fair use because Ripps wasn’t using the BAYC marks to sell Yug Labs’ BAYC NFTs, but rather your competitor’s RR/BAYC NFTs.
Yug Labs The case shows how important it is to understand the technology behind IP claims when NFTs are involved. When the court looked under the hood, it saw that both Ripple’s RR/BAYC NFTs and Era Labs’ BAYC NFTs pointed to the same digital asset. Based on these facts, the court correctly saw Ripps’ NFTs as a collection of fake items, not as a way for him to express himself through art.
This decision is different from a recent one about trademarks or NFTs. In that case, Hermès, the company that makes the famous “Birkin” handbag, sued the person who made digital images of “MetaBirkins,” which were handbags with fake fur on them and were sold as NFTs. Different Yug Labs In that case, the court said that Metabirkins’s work “could be a form of artistic expression,” so Rogers’s test was used to decide the case. Even though the court let the trademark claims go forward because the complaint “contains sufficient factual allegations that the use of the trademark is not artistically relevant and that the use of the trademark is clearly not the source or material of the work,” the court ruled that digital metabircoins were new expressive works that could be protected.
Leave this field empty if you're human:
