6 ms·

Bored Ape Yacht Club owner uses IP ownership rights to open restaurant

31 points by harambae 5y ago

QuikAccount 5y ago
This whole things reminds me of micro-transactions in video games where people were constantly waiting for the walls to close in on companies doing them while micro-transactions just continued to get more and more absurd and exploitative until finally the realization set in that the shoe was never going to drop.
- beebmam 5y ago
  Much of us moved on from any game with microtransactions, and only people with addictive problems buy that garbage. Deeply exploitative, just like casinos/gambling. I prefer living in a society where it's effectively banned
  - joe-collins 5y ago
    You may have moved on, but the industry as a whole certainly has not. Loot boxes, season passes, cosmetic item shops, etc are the force that has allowed the $60 box price to remain the default.
    - teruakohatu 5y ago
      > that has allowed the $60 box price The market has grown substantially which is what has allowed prices to remain the same. According to Wikipedia, the video game industry revenue grew 13x between 2007 and 2018. Eventually when the pie stops growing, the industry will demand higher prices, microtransactions or not. I would argue that prices have increased. We used to be able to buy a complete AAA game, now a substantial portion of it is unlocked on if the customer keeps paying. So $60 buys less than it used to. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_industry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_industry
      - klodolph 5y ago
        I’ve been playing games recently and I can’t think of cases where I didn’t feel like I got a complete game for $60. Is that a myth that just keeps getting repeated? Or are there specific games where that’s true? The price is probably gonna go up a little bit either way.
        QuikAccount 5y ago
        It depends on a lot of things like when you bought the game and who you bought it from. Some issues get fixed over time and some companies are just put out better products than other. A good example of this recently is Hitman 3 which may very well have the most confusing product releases ever.
quickthrower2 5y ago
Nice game. Show you can make a biz from an NFT and your NFT goes up in value too. Just need to keep reminding people of the brand every day for the next 50 years like Coke and Nike do.
ganzuul 5y ago
Zero sum.
iaabtpbtpnn 5y ago
You couldn't pay ME to eat food with those disgusting mutated apes printed on it. What is he thinking?
- dhbanes 5y ago
  He’s thinking that a bunch of hater nerds like us aren’t his target audience.
  - ipaddr 5y ago
    He is thinking there is at least one person stupider than I.
randomhodler84 5y ago
Hahahaha what? Sorry dude, nobody wants to see a copy of that $267k ugly jpeg on their fries. This whole movement is about forcing a brand. Thing is, the brand sucks, everyone that bought into it sucks, and everyone else laughing at the cringe and stupidity. Paris Hilton on Fallon was the jump the shark moment.
- Gigachad 5y ago
  NFTs and the Bored Apes just seem like a joke that never ends.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
arcticbull 5y ago
So if someone steals the keys are they going to have to shred the packaging and replace all the employee uniforms?
- antupis 5y ago
  Or start paying royalties to thief.
anm89 5y ago
The problem with thinking thhis is dumb (and i think this is really dumb) is that you are automatically revealing your membership in the group who was never going to like it in the first place. I would have thought the NFTs would be selling for $20a piece and yet clearly im wrong. So, sadly, i wont be surprised if this is successful, at least for a while.
joering2 5y ago
Fun fact: if you read Crypto Kitties TOS [1], you can clearly see that you really don't hold any copyright rights at all, all art is owned and protected by Dapper Labs Inc., and - the best part: you are NOT allowed to make more than $100,000 in gross revenue per year (ii. Commercial Use part) from your, erm, "ownership." I'm still scratching my head... what do you actually own??? https://www.cryptokitties.co/terms-of-use https://www.cryptokitties.co/terms-of-use
- woodruffw 5y ago
  It's no small irony that cryptocurrency has seen a rise in Great Reset-esque reactionary thinking (as part of their spiel against traditional finance) while simultaneously debasing "ownership" more than any traditional economic shift I can think of.
- fouc 5y ago
  cryptokitties is from before NFTs came about isn't it?
  - rib3ye 5y ago
    They are still NFTs (arguably the first well-known NFTs), as they follow the ERC-721 token protocol.
  - quickthrower2 5y ago
    its one of the first (or maybe the first?) NFTs
- jeroenhd 5y ago
  > I'm still scratching my head... what do you actually own??? Short answer: nothing. You have the key to a part of a specific blockchain. Only you control who gets to change which wallet that part of the blockchain lives in, because only you have the key. You don't "own" anything in a legal sense, unless you consider that part of the blockchain being associated with your wallet public key to indicate ownership. NFTs are only useful as long as the people with an interest have the same ideas about the implications of the blockchain as you do. If you, and your friends, and your customers, and the stores you shop at, all decide that whoever holds the private key to a part of the blockchain owns that information (AND have that in writing somewhere, AND live in a place where that mere piece of writing is enough to transfer ownership of IP) then the person with the key owns the IP. Anyone can set up their own blockchain. Anyone can take every NFT on the ethereum blockchain, grab the data, and add it as an NFT to their own blockchain, in their own wallet. The only reason this doesn't mean anything is that nobody respects your blockchain when it comes to ownership. Just like the blockchain speculators, NFT speculators decide on which chain is useful for their purposes and attach some kind of inflated value to that in the hopes that they can buy low and sell high to other people who hope to do the same thing. Now I think this is very interesting when it comes to blockchains forking: who really controls the bit of information if one blockchain splits off into two or more blockchains? Which one is the authoritative one? Edit: the website of the Bored Ape Yacht Club says the following in their TOS: i. You Own the NFT. Each Bored Ape is an NFT on the Ethereum blockchain. When you purchase an NFT, you own the underlying Bored Ape, the Art, completely. Ownership of the NFT is mediated entirely by the Smart Contract and the Ethereum Network: at no point may we seize, freeze, or otherwise modify the ownership of any Bored Ape. ii. Personal Use. Subject to your continued compliance with these Terms, Yuga Labs LLC grants you a worldwide, royalty-free license to use, copy, and display the purchased Art, along with any extensions that you choose to create or use, solely for the following purposes: (i) for your own personal, non-commercial use; (ii) as part of a marketplace that permits the purchase and sale of your Bored Ape / NFT, provided that the marketplace cryptographically verifies each Bored Ape owner’s rights to display the Art for their Bored Ape to ensure that only the actual owner can display the Art; or (iii) as part of a third party website or application that permits the inclusion, involvement, or participation of your Bored Ape, provided that the website/application cryptographically verifies each Bored Ape owner’s rights to display the Art for their Bored Ape to ensure that only the actual owner can display the Art, and provided that the Art is no longer visible once the owner ofthe Bored Ape leaves the website/application. iii. Commercial Use. Subject to your continued compliance with these Terms, Yuga Labs LLC grants you an unlimited, worldwide license to use, copy, and display the purchased Art for the purpose of creating derivative works based upon the Art (“Commercial Use”). Examples of such Commercial Use would e.g. be the use of the Art to produce and sell merchandise products (T-Shirts etc.) displaying copies of the Art. For the sake of clarity, nothing in this Section will be deemed to restrict you from (i) owning or operating a marketplace that permits the use and sale of Bored Apes generally, provided that the marketplace cryptographically verifies each Bored Ape owner’s rights to display the Art for their Bored Ape to ensure that only the actual owner can display the Art; (ii) owning or operating a third party website or application that permits the inclusion, involvement, or participation of Bored Apes generally, provided that the third party website or application cryptographically verifies each Bored Ape owner’s rights to display the Art for their Bored Ape to ensure that only the actual owner can display the Art, and provided that the Art is no longer visible once the owner of the Purchased Bored Ape leaves the website/application; or (iii) earning revenue from any of the foregoing. Do note that reselling the NFT does not necessarily follow the same terms, so you might end up with a situation where someone owns the NFT and someone else owns the IP. The terms of sale seem to hand over all the IP and rights to the buyer, but then continue to later restrict those rights. I don't think you can have your cake and eat it too in that sense, but it'll depend on the jurisdiction where a violation might occur.
labrador 5y ago
I grew up kind of poor. I was one of the smart ones. A lot of the neighborhood kids were dummies. Good people, but not too bright. Fast forward a couple decades and I made a fair bit of money in the software business. I started meeting rich people. The thing that surprised me is that a lot of the children of rich people are also dumb. I'd say about the same percentage. My theory is that NFTs and Bored Apes are a fad of dumb rich kids playing with Mom or Dad's money, which they are given so they stay out of their hair. Kind of like Garbage Patch Kids of the old days. It's kind of brilliant actually. I'm trying to think of ideas that appeal to dumb rich young adults but not being dumb, I don't know what appeals to dumb people.
- aero-glide2 5y ago
  On the contrary I've seen many poor people get into nfts to get rich quick.
  - labrador 5y ago
    Poor people aren't spending 10's or 100's of thousands of dollars on NFTs. I'm not talking about poor kids. I'm talking about rich kids. $276k avg price https://www.nft-stats.com/collection/boredapeyachtclub https://www.nft-stats.com/collection/boredapeyachtclub
    - fouc 5y ago
      I assume a lot of that is from people that already got rich with crypto in the first place.. Also, the average price is based on the current value I'm guessing rather than the value at the time of purchase?
      - labrador 5y ago
        > I assume a lot of that is from people that already got rich with crypto in the first place. I don't think that is a good assumption. I don't know the space that well, but from what I gather, some smart rich people set up a market to suck in dumb rich people. Poor kids got rich in the 2015 to 18 timeframe on Bitcoin and Ether. I've not familiar with poor kids getting rich on NFTs
sergiotapia 5y ago
"hypebeast.com" you can't make this shit up.
- rib3ye 5y ago
  Hypebeast has been a reputable institution in streets fashion/culture for over a decade.
kart23 5y ago
nfts aren't cool. The owner's other spots are actually popular because they're somewhat interesting: Afters, Matte Black Coffee, you see that stuff all over instagram and word-of-mouth does the rest. I promise you nobody wants to put nfts on their instagram unless they're trying to market some crypto stuff they're pushing. Like zuck said, ads aren't cool. And NFTs are pretty much just advertising at this point to get other people to buy into it.
rib3ye 5y ago
Just what I need: A picture of a $267,000 NFT on my soda to remind me I'm not rich.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
schemescape 5y ago
I'm not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. The license for these NFTs is posted here (commercial use is allowed and there's no monetary cap): https://boredapeyachtclub.com/#/terms https://boredapeyachtclub.com/#/terms From an uninformed point of view, it seems to be granting a license to the NFT holders to use Yuga Labs LLC's property. Is there anything stopping Yuga Labs from changing/revoking the license? What happens if Oracle buys Yuga Labs?
WheelsAtLarge 5y ago
Brilliant, advertising is a huge expense for a new business. You have to spend a lot of cash to make sure people know about you. McDonalds spends billions to keep its products fresh in everyone's mind. Imagine how hard it is for a small company to break in. If this guy can deliver food that people can love then he will ride the nft hype to a successful company. He paid a few hundred thousand dollars for the ape but he will probably get the equivalent of millions in free advertising.
ta8903 5y ago
The renders of the packaging look terrible, like they were made by some amateur in 5 minutes.
Eddy_Viscosity2 5y ago
“The reason I did this was to make a statement to the public, letting them know that this jpeg … could be utilized to turn into a brand and ecosystem for the restaurant world.” He isn't cashing in on the jpeg, but on the media hype surrounding the NFT nonsense; the jpeg is incidental. Cashing in on existing media hype is not a bad move, I mean, why not take advantage of the free advertising. But its deceptive to tell people its about the jpeg. Deception is not a rare commodity in the crypto space. The 'art' of these NFTs is clearly garbage, in fact I think that's part of the point. Its fascinating to people that something so obviously bad could be worth so much.

31 points by harambae 5y ago

This whole things reminds me of micro-transactions in video games where people were constantly waiting for the walls to close in on companies doing them while micro-transactions just continued to get more and more absurd and exploitative until finally the realization set in that the shoe was never going to drop.

beebmam 5y ago
Much of us moved on from any game with microtransactions, and only people with addictive problems buy that garbage. Deeply exploitative, just like casinos/gambling. I prefer living in a society where it's effectively banned
- joe-collins 5y ago
  You may have moved on, but the industry as a whole certainly has not. Loot boxes, season passes, cosmetic item shops, etc are the force that has allowed the $60 box price to remain the default.
  - teruakohatu 5y ago
    > that has allowed the $60 box price The market has grown substantially which is what has allowed prices to remain the same. According to Wikipedia, the video game industry revenue grew 13x between 2007 and 2018. Eventually when the pie stops growing, the industry will demand higher prices, microtransactions or not. I would argue that prices have increased. We used to be able to buy a complete AAA game, now a substantial portion of it is unlocked on if the customer keeps paying. So $60 buys less than it used to. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_industry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_industry
    - klodolph 5y ago
      I’ve been playing games recently and I can’t think of cases where I didn’t feel like I got a complete game for $60. Is that a myth that just keeps getting repeated? Or are there specific games where that’s true? The price is probably gonna go up a little bit either way.
      - QuikAccount 5y ago
        It depends on a lot of things like when you bought the game and who you bought it from. Some issues get fixed over time and some companies are just put out better products than other. A good example of this recently is Hitman 3 which may very well have the most confusing product releases ever.

quickthrower2 5y ago

Nice game. Show you can make a biz from an NFT and your NFT goes up in value too. Just need to keep reminding people of the brand every day for the next 50 years like Coke and Nike do.

ganzuul 5y ago

Zero sum.

iaabtpbtpnn 5y ago

You couldn't pay ME to eat food with those disgusting mutated apes printed on it. What is he thinking?

dhbanes 5y ago
He’s thinking that a bunch of hater nerds like us aren’t his target audience.
- ipaddr 5y ago
  He is thinking there is at least one person stupider than I.

randomhodler84 5y ago

Hahahaha what? Sorry dude, nobody wants to see a copy of that $267k ugly jpeg on their fries. This whole movement is about forcing a brand. Thing is, the brand sucks, everyone that bought into it sucks, and everyone else laughing at the cringe and stupidity. Paris Hilton on Fallon was the jump the shark moment.

Gigachad 5y ago
NFTs and the Bored Apes just seem like a joke that never ends.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

arcticbull 5y ago

So if someone steals the keys are they going to have to shred the packaging and replace all the employee uniforms?

antupis 5y ago
Or start paying royalties to thief.

anm89 5y ago

The problem with thinking thhis is dumb (and i think this is really dumb) is that you are automatically revealing your membership in the group who was never going to like it in the first place. I would have thought the NFTs would be selling for $20a piece and yet clearly im wrong. So, sadly, i wont be surprised if this is successful, at least for a while.

joering2 5y ago

Fun fact: if you read Crypto Kitties TOS [1], you can clearly see that you really don't hold any copyright rights at all, all art is owned and protected by Dapper Labs Inc., and - the best part: you are NOT allowed to make more than $100,000 in gross revenue per year (ii. Commercial Use part) from your, erm, "ownership." I'm still scratching my head... what do you actually own??? https://www.cryptokitties.co/terms-of-use https://www.cryptokitties.co/terms-of-use

woodruffw 5y ago
It's no small irony that cryptocurrency has seen a rise in Great Reset-esque reactionary thinking (as part of their spiel against traditional finance) while simultaneously debasing "ownership" more than any traditional economic shift I can think of.
fouc 5y ago
cryptokitties is from before NFTs came about isn't it?
- rib3ye 5y ago
  They are still NFTs (arguably the first well-known NFTs), as they follow the ERC-721 token protocol.
- quickthrower2 5y ago
  its one of the first (or maybe the first?) NFTs
jeroenhd 5y ago
> I'm still scratching my head... what do you actually own??? Short answer: nothing. You have the key to a part of a specific blockchain. Only you control who gets to change which wallet that part of the blockchain lives in, because only you have the key. You don't "own" anything in a legal sense, unless you consider that part of the blockchain being associated with your wallet public key to indicate ownership. NFTs are only useful as long as the people with an interest have the same ideas about the implications of the blockchain as you do. If you, and your friends, and your customers, and the stores you shop at, all decide that whoever holds the private key to a part of the blockchain owns that information (AND have that in writing somewhere, AND live in a place where that mere piece of writing is enough to transfer ownership of IP) then the person with the key owns the IP. Anyone can set up their own blockchain. Anyone can take every NFT on the ethereum blockchain, grab the data, and add it as an NFT to their own blockchain, in their own wallet. The only reason this doesn't mean anything is that nobody respects your blockchain when it comes to ownership. Just like the blockchain speculators, NFT speculators decide on which chain is useful for their purposes and attach some kind of inflated value to that in the hopes that they can buy low and sell high to other people who hope to do the same thing. Now I think this is very interesting when it comes to blockchains forking: who really controls the bit of information if one blockchain splits off into two or more blockchains? Which one is the authoritative one? Edit: the website of the Bored Ape Yacht Club says the following in their TOS: i. You Own the NFT. Each Bored Ape is an NFT on the Ethereum blockchain. When you purchase an NFT, you own the underlying Bored Ape, the Art, completely. Ownership of the NFT is mediated entirely by the Smart Contract and the Ethereum Network: at no point may we seize, freeze, or otherwise modify the ownership of any Bored Ape. ii. Personal Use. Subject to your continued compliance with these Terms, Yuga Labs LLC grants you a worldwide, royalty-free license to use, copy, and display the purchased Art, along with any extensions that you choose to create or use, solely for the following purposes: (i) for your own personal, non-commercial use; (ii) as part of a marketplace that permits the purchase and sale of your Bored Ape / NFT, provided that the marketplace cryptographically verifies each Bored Ape owner’s rights to display the Art for their Bored Ape to ensure that only the actual owner can display the Art; or (iii) as part of a third party website or application that permits the inclusion, involvement, or participation of your Bored Ape, provided that the website/application cryptographically verifies each Bored Ape owner’s rights to display the Art for their Bored Ape to ensure that only the actual owner can display the Art, and provided that the Art is no longer visible once the owner ofthe Bored Ape leaves the website/application. iii. Commercial Use. Subject to your continued compliance with these Terms, Yuga Labs LLC grants you an unlimited, worldwide license to use, copy, and display the purchased Art for the purpose of creating derivative works based upon the Art (“Commercial Use”). Examples of such Commercial Use would e.g. be the use of the Art to produce and sell merchandise products (T-Shirts etc.) displaying copies of the Art. For the sake of clarity, nothing in this Section will be deemed to restrict you from (i) owning or operating a marketplace that permits the use and sale of Bored Apes generally, provided that the marketplace cryptographically verifies each Bored Ape owner’s rights to display the Art for their Bored Ape to ensure that only the actual owner can display the Art; (ii) owning or operating a third party website or application that permits the inclusion, involvement, or participation of Bored Apes generally, provided that the third party website or application cryptographically verifies each Bored Ape owner’s rights to display the Art for their Bored Ape to ensure that only the actual owner can display the Art, and provided that the Art is no longer visible once the owner of the Purchased Bored Ape leaves the website/application; or (iii) earning revenue from any of the foregoing. Do note that reselling the NFT does not necessarily follow the same terms, so you might end up with a situation where someone owns the NFT and someone else owns the IP. The terms of sale seem to hand over all the IP and rights to the buyer, but then continue to later restrict those rights. I don't think you can have your cake and eat it too in that sense, but it'll depend on the jurisdiction where a violation might occur.

labrador 5y ago

I grew up kind of poor. I was one of the smart ones. A lot of the neighborhood kids were dummies. Good people, but not too bright. Fast forward a couple decades and I made a fair bit of money in the software business. I started meeting rich people. The thing that surprised me is that a lot of the children of rich people are also dumb. I'd say about the same percentage. My theory is that NFTs and Bored Apes are a fad of dumb rich kids playing with Mom or Dad's money, which they are given so they stay out of their hair. Kind of like Garbage Patch Kids of the old days. It's kind of brilliant actually. I'm trying to think of ideas that appeal to dumb rich young adults but not being dumb, I don't know what appeals to dumb people.

aero-glide2 5y ago
On the contrary I've seen many poor people get into nfts to get rich quick.
- labrador 5y ago
  Poor people aren't spending 10's or 100's of thousands of dollars on NFTs. I'm not talking about poor kids. I'm talking about rich kids. $276k avg price https://www.nft-stats.com/collection/boredapeyachtclub https://www.nft-stats.com/collection/boredapeyachtclub
  - fouc 5y ago
    I assume a lot of that is from people that already got rich with crypto in the first place.. Also, the average price is based on the current value I'm guessing rather than the value at the time of purchase?
    - labrador 5y ago
      > I assume a lot of that is from people that already got rich with crypto in the first place. I don't think that is a good assumption. I don't know the space that well, but from what I gather, some smart rich people set up a market to suck in dumb rich people. Poor kids got rich in the 2015 to 18 timeframe on Bitcoin and Ether. I've not familiar with poor kids getting rich on NFTs

sergiotapia 5y ago

"hypebeast.com" you can't make this shit up.

rib3ye 5y ago
Hypebeast has been a reputable institution in streets fashion/culture for over a decade.

kart23 5y ago

nfts aren't cool. The owner's other spots are actually popular because they're somewhat interesting: Afters, Matte Black Coffee, you see that stuff all over instagram and word-of-mouth does the rest. I promise you nobody wants to put nfts on their instagram unless they're trying to market some crypto stuff they're pushing. Like zuck said, ads aren't cool. And NFTs are pretty much just advertising at this point to get other people to buy into it.

rib3ye 5y ago

Just what I need: A picture of a $267,000 NFT on my soda to remind me I'm not rich.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

schemescape 5y ago

I'm not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. The license for these NFTs is posted here (commercial use is allowed and there's no monetary cap): https://boredapeyachtclub.com/#/terms https://boredapeyachtclub.com/#/terms From an uninformed point of view, it seems to be granting a license to the NFT holders to use Yuga Labs LLC's property. Is there anything stopping Yuga Labs from changing/revoking the license? What happens if Oracle buys Yuga Labs?

WheelsAtLarge 5y ago

Brilliant, advertising is a huge expense for a new business. You have to spend a lot of cash to make sure people know about you. McDonalds spends billions to keep its products fresh in everyone's mind. Imagine how hard it is for a small company to break in. If this guy can deliver food that people can love then he will ride the nft hype to a successful company. He paid a few hundred thousand dollars for the ape but he will probably get the equivalent of millions in free advertising.

ta8903 5y ago

The renders of the packaging look terrible, like they were made by some amateur in 5 minutes.

Eddy_Viscosity2 5y ago

“The reason I did this was to make a statement to the public, letting them know that this jpeg … could be utilized to turn into a brand and ecosystem for the restaurant world.” He isn't cashing in on the jpeg, but on the media hype surrounding the NFT nonsense; the jpeg is incidental. Cashing in on existing media hype is not a bad move, I mean, why not take advantage of the free advertising. But its deceptive to tell people its about the jpeg. Deception is not a rare commodity in the crypto space. The 'art' of these NFTs is clearly garbage, in fact I think that's part of the point. Its fascinating to people that something so obviously bad could be worth so much.