Bored Ape makers win in lawsuit against copycats

The team behind the BAYC NFT series, Yuga Labs, is currently fighting both alleged copycats and falling prices.

The team behind the BAYC NFT series, Yuga Labs, is currently fighting against alleged copycats as well as falling prices.

From court documents shows that Yuga Labs scored a major win in its legal battle against alleged copycats. The creators of the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) NFT series accuse Ryder Ripps and Jeremy Cahen of copyright infringement with their "RR/BAYC" NFTs.

A court in New York has now ruled that Yuga Labs is entitled to damages and a injunction against the imitators.

The imitators described their project as a "parody" and invoked freedom of speech. With the near-identical Bored Ape collection, they only aimed to criticize the original, according to the creators of the alleged copies.

Yuga Labs, by contrast, argued that the copies would confuse buyers of the originals and enrich the imitators at the expense of customers. The court's decision is thus a "legal milestone for the Web3 sector," a Yuga Labs spokesperson told Decrypt. Meanwhile, amid ongoing legal battles, the NFT sector faces declining prices.

New NFT Price Floor data shows that popular works like CryptoPunks and BAYC have fallen below the $100,000 floor for the first time in months. That is far from the nearly one million US dollars that a user paid for a Bored Ape last year.