One of the founders of Bored Ape Yacht Club's NFT RR/BAYC collection has filed a notice of opposition against 10 Yuga Labs trademark applications.
The move marks another strange turn in the course intellectual property dispute between BAYC creators Yuga Labs and RR/BAYC founders Ryder Ripps and Jeremy Cahen.
Cahen archived the notice of opposition to the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Trademark Trial and Appeal Board on February 9. read "pending" at the time of writing this article.
Yuga Labs' trademark applications were submitted primarily in the second half of 2021 and cover a ton of BAYC logos, artwork, and trademarks for potential use in digital products such as NFT-based art, trading cards, and Metaverse wearables.
The presentations also list the potential of BAYC's physical products, which include clothing, jewelry, watches and key chains, along with entertainment services such as games, television and music.
Speaking with Bloomberg Law on February 11, a Yuga Labs spokesperson juice it reduced the chances that Cahen's opposition would succeed and suggested that the move was just another attempt to cause trouble for the company.
"The Trademark Office has preliminarily approved Yuga Labs' trademark applications, and we look forward to its full approval in due course," they said, adding that:
"Jeremy Cahen's filing is just another attempt to divert attention from the real issue at hand, his infringement of Yuga's intellectual property."
In the notice, Cahen presents a long list of "oppositional grounds" against Yuga Labs' submissions. In particular, Cahen claims that the company "relinquished any rights" to certain logo designs and artwork because sales of BAYC NFT granted "all rights" to the digital images to the owners.
It also claims that Yuga Labs is not the rightful owner of specific skull designs due to the company allegedly handing over the rights to ApeCoin's decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) in March 2022.
Furthermore, Cahen argues that Yuga Labs did not provide a "good faith intent to legally use" the trademarks in its submissions, as NFTs must be registered and classified as securities under federal law.
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BAYC's creators, Yuga Labs, sued digital artist Ryder Ripps and Cahen in June for using BAYC images in the RR/BAYC collection. The firm also alleged that the duo was intentionally "trolling Yuga Labs and defrauding consumers" into purchasing his NFT impersonations.
Cahen's move also comes just three days later Yuga Labs settled a separate lawsuit against the RR/BAYC website and smart contract developer Thomas Lehman.
As part of the settlement, Lehman essentially accepted a permanent injunction barring it from participating in any "confusingly similar" BAYC-related projects. In a statement, Lehman also distanced itself from Ryder Ripp and Cahen.
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