Yuga Labs hires Jeremy Goldman as the new BAYC copyright license holder
According to a Yuga Labs’ Tweet, the NFT startup has contracted Jeremy Goldman, a copyright and IP attorney, to sort out the confusion around IP licenses and commercial rights directed to ape hodlers.
Jeremy Goldman lands a new job
Yuga Labs has reportedly contacted Jeremy Goldman to sort out an emerging confusion the NFT company was facing with IP licenses and commercial rights of all Ape hodlers.
An article published on the Yuga Labs news blog indicates that the NFT firm was facing trademark infringements and lawsuits. These challenges have sparked a wave of concerns from the Bored Ape Yacht Club members concerning the rights they retain when owning an NFT from the club.
Jeremy disputed claims brought forward by some of the club’s members who suggested that the licenses they received from Yuga Labs when owning these apes were invalid.
Reinforcing their claims, these members explained that Yuga Labs had nill copyright ownership rights in the Bored Ape Yacht Club art collection. In his disputing views, Jeremy gave three distinctions for copyright ownership, stating that Yuga Labs met all of them as far as the BAYC NFT collection is concerned.
The first attribute is originality or creativity. Jeremy explained that the collection was initially composed by Yuga Labs artists and virtual designers. He claimed that BAYC met the minimum threshold for copyright ownership, citing that “simple fabric of stars and clouds or a logo of a boat made up of basic geometric shapes are sufficiently original.”
Secondly, he emphasized that copyright claims require human authorship and mentioned that each token in the BAYC collection was physically designed and outlined by a human being through a custom script design. He added that humans did most of the work using digital tools to achieve the desired products currently in circulation today. Finally, he said that items with fixed tangible expression media, including NFTs, qualify for copyright claims.
Yuga Labs owns all copyright for the BAYC collection
According to Jeremy, Yuga Labs’ BAYC meets all the requirements of legal copyright protection regardless of whether physical registration processes are involved. Having cleared all BAYC ownership confusion, Jeremy added that Yuga is free to exercise its copyright ownership of the BAYC collection by delegating some rights to the tokens’ hodlers.
Owning a BAYC Non-Fungible Token gives the hodler a digital artwork ownership license and a commercial license. As Yuga Lab onboards Jeremy Goldman, recent news highlighted that Wylie Aronow, Yuga Labs co-founder, was taking sick leave due to deteriorating health conditions.
Wylie announced on Twitter that he was diagnosed with heart failure and had been battling the illness alongside work-related challenges for the past year. The sick BAYC pioneer expressed his positive views on the NFT project in the coming years.
Yuga Labs was brought to life in 2021 by Wylie Aronow and co-founder Greg Solano in Miami. The company is currently expanding towards the metaverse and GameFi thanks to projects like the Otherside and Dookey Dash.
