Bored Ape Spinoff NFT Collection Leads to Legal Battles Over Copyright

March 22, 2022 - Around 2 mins mins to read

The popularity of the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT collection cannot be denied, so much so that a number of spinoffs have appeared, creating a legal dispute amongst digital artists.

Bored Ape Spinoff NFT Collection Leads to Legal Battles Over Copyright — *Source: Caked Apes*

Caked Apes, a Bored Ape spinoff series, debuted in January in response to the success of the cartoon ape NFTs.

There are 49 of the multicolored Caked Apes posted on the NFT marketplace OpenSea, with four owners, but no pricing information is available on the site or on CryptoSlam.

According to Bloomberg, the teams behind each collection are now suing them other over caricature designs and income splits.

According to the newspaper, rival lawsuits have been filed in federal courts in Los Angeles. Taylor Whitley, the owner of 11 Bored Apes, filed a lawsuit late last week alleging that the Caked Ape crew infringed on digital designs and kicked him out of the project.

On March 20, Jacob Nygard and three other CA collection owners responded with their own complaint, accusing Whitley of attempting to seize control of their joint enterprise. Whitley was also charged of violating federal copyright laws in order to get the collection removed from internet markets.

On March 21, the Caked Apes team posted an update, stating:

“Once Taylor saw the sales of Caked Apes take off, he tried to renege on our agreed-upon deal and claim a bigger piece of the pie with no legal or ethical grounds to back up his claims.”

Nygard’s lawyer, John Snow, stated that it was “one of the first cases dealing with the Bored Ape license and what’s allowed and what’s not allowed.”

Whitley claimed that whatever license he issued to his former Caked Apes partners was terminated since his digital art agency never got the “agreed-upon portion of revenue,” according to the article.

According to the lawsuit, over 9,000 Caked Apes NFTs were sold out, generating $1.9 million in direct sales and $225,000 in secondary sales royalties.

According to Whitley’s lawyer, John Purcell, he was “instrumental to all stages of the founding, creation, and launch of Caked Apes and has been unlawfully alienated from his creations.”

The Caked Ape team of four, on the other hand, maintains that Whitley “contributed no original drawings to the Caked Apes creations.”

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