A long-running legal saga between Yuga Labs, the parent company of Bored Ape Yacht Club, and artist Ryder Ripps and his business partner Jeremy Cahen, has finally ended, with the parties reaching a settlement on Tuesday. While the terms of the settlement are confidential, the parties disclosed that they agreed to a permanent injunction against Ripps and Cahen using any trademarks or images owned by Yuga Labs.
The lawsuit stemmed from Ripps’s quest, at the height of the NFT craze in 2022, to prove that the founders of Bored Ape Yacht Club had threaded their NFT series with racist imagery, pointing to the accessories the Apes wear, including Prussian helmets and safari hats, which Ripps contended were tied to alt-right culture. Further, he argued that the BAYC symbol of a white Ape skull resembled a Nazi Totenkopf emblem. Yuga Labs, for its part, repeatedly denied these claims, and emphasized the diverse backgrounds of its founders and primary funder, music mogul Guy Oseary.
The next step in Ripps’s quest to take down BAYC was to launch his own NFT collection, titled RR/BAYC, whose smart contracts contained the same URL embedded in BAYC smart contracts. The accompanying images were identical to BAYC’s Apes. Ripps reported that he had sold 9,500 of those NFTs for a total of $1.6 million in 2022. At the time, and since, Ripps claimed that the NFT collection was a protected use of appropriation art to challenge the copyright around NFTs, draw attention to BAYC’s supposed offensive material, and ultimately to bring down the NFT empire.
Naturally, Yuga Labs sued Ripps, and his partner Cahen, alleging false advertising, trademark infringement, and cybersquatting. The case wound its way through the federal court system, with a district judge ordering Ripps and Cahen to pay Yuga Labs as much as $8.8 million in damages and attorney’s fees. That ruling came in October 2023 before the case went to trial. Ripps and Cahen successfully appealed, with the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals overturning the decision last July and determining that a trial was necessary to determine if Ripps’s NFTs actually infringed Yuga’s trademarks. Ripps, Cahen, and Yuga Labs have been in settlement conferencing over the last several months, likely trying to avoid a costly trial.
In the end, it seems, Ripps just needed to wait out the craze. Since raising $450 million at a $4 billion valuation in 2022, Yuga Labs has watched its NFTs tank in value, with Futurism reporting in February that Justin Bieber’s BAYC NFT, purchased for $1.3 million, is now worth only $12,000, a 99 percent drop in value. Yuga Labs has gone through several rounds of layoffs, and is hardly the darling of the tech world anymore, which has moved on to AI startups.
