Bored Ape Yacht Club Legal Fight Ends With Settlement and Permanent Injunction
The long-running dispute between Yuga Labs, the company behind Bored Ape Yacht Club, and artist Ryder Ripps (b. 1986) and his business partner Jeremy Cahen has ended in settlement, closing a case that became a proxy battle over NFTs, trademark law, and appropriation art. The parties reached the agreement on Tuesday. While the terms remain confidential, they disclosed that Ripps and Cahen are now permanently barred from using any trademarks or images owned by Yuga Labs.
The lawsuit grew out of Ripps’s 2022 project RR/BAYC, which reused BAYC imagery and embedded the same URL found in Bored Ape smart contracts. Ripps said he sold 9,500 of the NFTs for $1.6 million that year. He argued that the project was protected appropriation art, designed to challenge what he described as racist imagery in the Bored Ape universe and to draw attention to the broader culture surrounding the collection.
Yuga Labs rejected those claims and sued Ripps and Cahen for false advertising, trademark infringement, and cybersquatting. The case moved through federal court with unusual speed and volatility. In October 2023, a district judge ordered the defendants to pay as much as $8.8 million in damages and attorney’s fees. Last July, however, the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals overturned that ruling and said a trial was needed to determine whether Ripps’s NFTs actually infringed Yuga’s trademarks.
The settlement arrives at a markedly different moment for Yuga Labs than the one that fueled the original conflict. The company raised $450 million in 2022 at a $4 billion valuation, when the NFT market was still in full speculative bloom. Since then, the sector has cooled sharply. In February, Futurism reported that Justin Bieber’s BAYC NFT, purchased for $1.3 million, was then worth just $12,000.
That collapse in value has been matched by a broader retreat in attention. Yuga Labs has gone through several rounds of layoffs, and the company is no longer the emblem of tech exuberance it once was. The settlement suggests that, in the end, the legal fight outlasted the market frenzy that made it possible.
