Yuga Lab’s lawsuit against Bored Ape ‘Troll’ may have just opened a can of worms

A federal judge ruled Monday that Wylie Aronow and Greg Solano, the co-founders of Yuga Labs — the $4 billion firm behind the dominant NFT collection Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) — must face the company’s ongoing trademark infringement lawsuit against Ryder Ripps, conceptual artist and internet provocateur.

The ruling marks the latest escalation in a long-running and sinister saga involving one of crypto’s key players. In early 2022, Ripps began circulating allegations that Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs contained latent, but intentional, racist and pro-Nazi imagery. In May, Ripps – in what he claimed was a politically charged statement about artistic expression – sold a replica collection of 10,000 Bored Ape NFTs.

Ripps said the collection highlighted Yuga’s Nazi ties, as well as legal issues related to the reproducibility of NFTs. Yuga said that constituted trademark infringement, and sued the artist in federal court.

In the months since, Yuga—perhaps the most dominant brand in the emerging multibillion-dollar NFT industry—has tried, and at times struggled, to walk a tightrope between getting a vocal critic to make incendiary claims and inadvertently hand him extra ammo.

Yuga appears to be doing his best to minimize the artist’s ability to leverage the lawsuit to his advantage. The company sued Ripps exclusively for trademark infringement, not for copyright infringement or defamation – a very specific legal strategy which may have been tailored to prevent Ripps from turning the case into a referendum on duplicating NFTs or a showcase for his inflammatory claims.

But the latest developments in the case may have set it on the path to more sensation, not less.

Yuga sought to block Ripps’ attorney from deposing Aronow and Solano, arguing in a Jan. 5 filing that both Yuga co-founders were “key witnesses”— High-level employees are sometimes exempt from depositions if other lower-level employees can testify to the same information.

However, the case’s judge on Monday labeled such arguments as “factually deficient”, finding that only Yuga’s co-founders could speak about the origins of the Bored Ape brand.

The judge further admonished Yuga for a “lack of diligence,” citing the company’s failure to respond to multiple requests from Ripps’ attorney to discuss deposition planning and ordered Yuga’s co-founders to submit to deposition at the earliest possible date.

Yuga declined Decryptits request to comment on the matter; however, a source close to the matter confirmed that the company intends to cooperate with the deposition process following Monday’s ruling.

Ripps, for his part, told Decrypt that he looks forward to the opportunity to question Yuga’s top leadership under oath.

“The fact that they, who sued me, cannot account for their own actions and have avoided producing anything throughout the discovery process should say something,” he said.

Alfred Steiner, one of Ripps’ attorneys, said he understood why Yuga has been so hesitant to put his management in a deposition room.

“No one wants to be deposed,” Steiner said Decrypt. “They don’t want to answer the hard, uncomfortable questions that the defendants’ criticisms demand.”

That criticism, as presented in December archiving on behalf of Ripps and his co-defendant Jeremy Cahen, delves deep into the earliest days of Yuga’s formation, arguing that the company’s foundations—the logos, images, even the name—were all built atop an intricate web of ironic, all- right-wing, neo-Nazi and racist allusions.

Yuga has vigorously denied such claims; Aronow has previously referred to Ripps as a “demented troll” engages in “ridiculous conspiracy theories”.

But Ripps and his team will now have the opportunity to press Aronow and others on that theory, in detail, under penalty of perjury. Whether or not this effort pays off for Ripps’ legal defense, it presents an opportunity the internet provocateur likely never would have been given otherwise.