SNEAK PEEK
- Jeremy Goldman, IP Lawyer is helping Yuga Labs in ownership rights.
- Yuga Labs has become the biggest project that gives IP licenses to their NFT owners.
- Yuga is in charge of their artwork’s patent rights.
Yuga Labs have tweeted that they have faced some confusion around the IP license and commercial rights. They contacted Jeremy Goldman, a copyright and IP lawyer, to clear things up.
We’ve seen some confusion around the IP license and commercial rights we grant to our NFT holders, so we asked copyright and IP lawyer @jeremyg2k to help clear things up. https://t.co/V2nF9svWmW
— Yuga Labs (@yugalabs) February 1, 2023
Yuga Labs became one of the first NFT projects to promote granting an IP license that offers NFT holders economic rights, initially with Bored Ape Yacht Club and subsequently with CryptoPunks and Meebits. BAYC holders have used Yuga’s rights to start restaurants, virtual comics, food trucks, computer games, hot sauce businesses, record labels, entertainment firms, and much more.
Recent allegations about a patent infringement case filed by Yuga have raised concerns regarding the rights of ownership offered to BAYC owners. Some people have even claimed that Yuga’s grant of the IP license to holders is unlawful since Yuga does not possess the copyright in the BAYC artwork. To this, Jeremy stated that they’re wrong.
Yuga controls the intellectual property rights to their artwork, and the amount of imagination required is quite minimal. Human authorship is required for copyright. True, using a script specially built for Yuga to mix and match attributes was part of the creation process for the BAYC artwork. In the situation of BAYC, however, humans did the “lion’s share” of the labor and sparked the project’s “creative spark.”
The BAYC artwork was created by Yuga’s designers and artists, who employed digital tools to assist them. Humans conceptualized and developed the whole collection, designing each unique foundation layer, attribute, and accessory, arranging those parts to form the characters, and iterating again until they were pleased with the completed product.
Yuga, irrespective of whether they go through the legal hassle of registration, possesses the copyright on their artwork.
