The Bored Ape Yacht Club and Ryder Ripps NFT feud continue as Yuga Labs filed a humongous lawsuit against him. A recent documentary that accused BAYC of having an underlying racist agenda split the entire NFT sector. But now, the BAYC community appears to be fighting back. Here is what transpired between the RRBAYC and Yuga Labs’ BAYC NFT lawsuit.
Why Are Yuga Labs Suing Ryder Ripps?
Yuga Labs filed a lawsuit against Ryder Ripps and Philion for trademark infringement, false advertising, misleading consumers, and unjust enrichment. All of that, they said, is part of a bigger scheme to harass Yuga Labs.
In their legal statement, the BAYC lawyers allege Ryder Ripps’ NFT collection is involved in “scamming consumers into purchasing RR/BAYC NFTs by misusing Yuga Labs’ trademarks”. The same lawsuit also alleges that it is an effort to devalue the original Bored Ape NFT Collection and his “Ape Market” nonfungible token collection is “sowing confusion” about whether RRBAYC is affiliated with Yuga Labs in any way.
Mostly, they even inject some little humor into the situation, stating that “this is no monkey business”.
What Is Ryder Ripps’ RRBAYC NFT collection?
Ryder Ripps launched a smear campaign against BAYC in January 2022. He alleges that Yuga Labs and Bored Ape founders have considerable links to alt-right 4chan meme culture. He also insists that BAYC itself is racist.
In that context, he set up a whole website known as gordongoner.com, the name of the BAYC founder, to demonstrate the issues he discovered in the collection. The Jewish conceptual artist alleges that most of the BAYC traits are racist, beginning with the Simianizaton of the collection.
Then, he goes on to attack the BAYC logo and likened its design to the Nazi Totenkopf emblem. His RRBAYC NFT collection is meant to protest against the original collection.
Yuga Labs’ Reaction To RRBAYC
Philion and Ryder Ripps unleashed their attack on Yuga Labs for their supposedly edgy usernames. Notably, the names ‘Gargamel’ and ‘emperor tomato ketchup’ can interestingly be construed as arising from racist internet memes and pedophilic respectively. While answering these claims, Yuga Labs unveiled a thread that explained the thought process behind their traits and names.
Nonetheless, this explanation did not satisfy the community after Ryder Ripps decided to stick to his story. Then, Opensea delisted the whole Ryder Ripps BAYC (RRBAYC) Collection and then Yuga Labs filed their lawsuit within 10 days.
Will Yuga Labs’ Allegations Stand Up In Court?
First, none of the people in the community are sure. Even though Ryder Ripps’ BAYC NFTs are a copy of BAYC, this may also be the lawsuit’s downfall. In general, RRBAYC NFTs link directly to the same IPFS files that are publicly available.
It means that they may not count as copies, but as hotlinks instead. Moreover, most cases in history decided that hotlinking is not an infringement of any IP rights (according to @justfred and @okshotshot on NFT Twitter). In that context, RRBAYC’s only issue may arise with the changing of metadata, since that could be perceived as using and altering the IP.
Is Bored Ape Yacht Club Racist?
Truthfully, the NFT community is currently split. On one side, there are various questionable traits that the holders found outrageous. For instance, take into consideration the rising sun trait from the BACK collection. Nonetheless, it is quite critical to note that Yuga Labs offers all its holders the opportunity to change that trait to a Japanese flag, after the severe backlash they received.
The rising sun trait on the BACK collection was considered quite insensitive to most people in Asia.
On the flip side, Ryder Ripps released his RRBAYC collection copying the whole and exact traits from the original BAYC collection. In case he found the traits racist, why would he go ahead and copy them?
Today, RRBAYC has a cumulative sales volume of 226 ETH. That is a lot of money that was made off “racist” NFTs. Moreover, some shocking use of the N-word and some questionable memes came up from Ryder Ripps’ past. While that might not signify anything, Azealia banks also accused him of coercing her into a sex recording and then blackmailing her into dropping the video version.
However this case turns out, is not good for the general NFT sector. We need to reevaluate NFT and derivative rights. Here is the full lawsuit.
