{"id":183223,"date":"2023-10-29T17:00:29","date_gmt":"2023-10-29T11:30:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/?p=183223"},"modified":"2023-10-29T17:00:29","modified_gmt":"2023-10-29T11:30:29","slug":"ryder-ripps-must-pay-yuga-labs-1-5-million-for-bored-ape-trademark-infringement-crypto-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/ryder-ripps-must-pay-yuga-labs-1-5-million-for-bored-ape-trademark-infringement-crypto-news\/","title":{"rendered":"Ryder Ripps Must Pay Yuga Labs $1.5 Million for Bored Ape Trademark Infringement – Crypto News"},"content":{"rendered":"
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A U.S. District Judge in California issued a judgment on Wednesday in favor of Yuga Labs, creators of the popular Bored Ape Yacht Club<\/a>, against Ryder Ripps (\u201cRipps\u201d) and Jeremy Cahen (\u201cCahen\u201d) and awarded Yuga Labs over $1.5 million in damage, the amount the court said Ripps and Cahen made in profits from the sale of Ryder Ripps Bored Ape Yacht Club which the court said infringed on Yuga Labs\u2019 trademark.<\/p>\n

According to court documents shared with Decrypt<\/i> by a Yuga Labs spokesperson, the defendants argued that their use of Yuga\u2019s BAYC trademarks was not infringement but \u201csatire\u201d and \u201cparody.\u201d<\/p>\n

“After the court ruling against Ryder Ripps and Jeremy Cahen for infringing Yuga Lab’s intellectual property, today they’ve been ordered to cease all sales and marketing of their counterfeit NFTs,\u201d the Yuga Labs spokesperson said\u00a0in an email. \u201cThey must pay $1.575 million in damages, Yuga’s attorneys’ fees, transfer their fake apes’ smart contract, and relinquish related online assets.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the ruling, Judge John Walter granted Yuga Labs\u2019 request the defendants pay $200,000 in damages for the cybersquatting violations, $100,000 per domain, and issued a permanent injunction against the defendants.<\/p>\n

\u201cHaving weighed all the factors in light of the undisputed evidence, the Court concludes that defendants acted with a bad faith intent to profit,\u201d the filing said. \u201cDefendants do not have any trademark or other intellectual property rights in the domain names and the domain names do not consist of the legal names of defendants.\u201d<\/p>\n

According to court documents, Ripps and Cahen argued that the Bored Ape Yacht Club logos or \u201cmarks\u201d were protected under the First Amendment and fair use. The court denied Ripps and Cahen\u2019s motion to dismiss and granted Yuga Labs a summary judgment for trademark infringement and cybersquatting claims.<\/p>\n

Cybersquatting refers to registering a domain name of a well-known company or brand with the intent to sell it for a later profit. Court documents pointed to rrbayc.com and apemarket.com as the domain names in question.<\/p>\n

\u201c[The defendants\u2019] only interest in the domain name is to divert customers who may have been searching for [p]laintiff\u2019s mark to their own commercial website,\u201d the court said. \u201cIn addition, defendants concealed their registration of the domain names through the use of a proxy registration service.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThis victory not only defeats scammers but supports creators advancing web3 experiences worldwide,” Yuga Labs\u2019 spokesperson said.<\/p>\n

The court also dismissed the defendants’ counterclaim that Yuga Labs made false accusations of infringement and used racist and neo-Nazi imagery in its BAYC NFTs.<\/p>\n

\u201cWith respect to Yuga\u2019s false designation of origin claim, the Court determined that, although the BAYC Marks are unregistered, Yuga owns the BAYC Marks and those Marks are valid and Protectible,\u201d the court said.<\/p>\n

The court ruled that Ripps and Cahen did not have a good faith reason for prior use of the domains because they registered the domains after Yuga had already launched the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs collection.<\/p>\n

Launched in April 2021, the Bored Ape Yacht Club is a collection of 10,000 randomly generated NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain. Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are cryptographically unique tokens linked to digital and physical content, providing proof of ownership.<\/p>\n

In addition to joining an exclusive community, Bored Ape Yacht Club holders are given unlimited copyright to use their apes in their media or designs. Last summer, Family Guy star Seth Green <\/a>paid $300,000 to recover a stolen Bored Ape NFT lost in a phishing attack.<\/p>\n

Edited by Ryan Ozawa<\/a>.<\/i><\/p>\n

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<\/p>\n

Stay on top of crypto news, get daily updates in your inbox.<\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A U.S. District Judge in California issued a judgment on Wednesday in favor of Yuga Labs, creators of the popular Bored Ape Yacht Club, against Ryder Ripps (\u201cRipps\u201d) and Jeremy Cahen (\u201cCahen\u201d) and awarded Yuga Labs over $1.5 million in damage, the amount the court said Ripps and Cahen made in profits from the sale […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":117606,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[230,225,221,227,226,228,229,60,223,224,222],"class_list":["post-183223","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cryptocurrency","tag-brave","tag-coinbase","tag-crypto","tag-decentralised","tag-decentralized","tag-decentralized-exchange","tag-erc-20","tag-featured","tag-meme-coin","tag-robinhood","tag-solana"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183223","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=183223"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183223\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":183225,"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183223\/revisions\/183225"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/117606"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=183223"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=183223"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dripp.zone\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=183223"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}