The confidential settlement ends a four-year legal battle that produced the first federal ruling confirming NFTs qualify as goods under US trademark law, with Ripps required to surrender all RR/BAYC smart contracts and domains within 10 days.
Yuga Labs and artist Ryder Ripps reached a settlement on Tuesday in their long-running trademark dispute over the RR/BAYC NFT collection, ending a case that had bounced between trial courts and the Ninth Circuit for nearly four years and produced some of the first federal rulings on intellectual property in digital assets.
The financial terms are confidential. What is public: Ripps and co-defendant Jeremy Cahen are permanently barred from using Yuga's imagery and trademarks, and they must transfer control of the RR/BAYC smart contracts, domain names, and any remaining NFTs associated with the project to Yuga within 10 days. The practical effect is that RR/BAYC — which Ripps framed as appropriation art and Yuga characterised as straightforward counterfeiting — ceases to exist as an independent project.
The settlement avoids a jury trial that both sides had reason to fear. Yuga filed suit in July 2022 in the US District Court for the Central District of California, alleging that Ripps and Cahen had minted NFTs using identical Bored Ape imagery and sold them under a name designed to confuse buyers. District Judge John F. Walter initially agreed, granting Yuga partial summary judgment in March 2023 and awarding approximately $9 million in damages — including around $7 million in attorneys' fees, disgorgement of profits, and statutory damages.
But the Ninth Circuit complicated things. On appeal, the court reversed the summary judgment on the consumer confusion issue, ruling that the question of whether buyers were actually misled required a jury to decide. The appeals court did, however, affirm two findings that carry weight well beyond this particular case: that NFTs qualify as "goods" under the Lanham Act, and that Ripps and Cahen's counterclaims to invalidate Yuga's copyright registrations failed. The first of those holdings — that a non-fungible token is a tradeable good subject to trademark law, not merely a receipt or a pointer to off-chain media — had been an open question in IP law since NFTs entered the mainstream.
Ripps had built his defence around the First Amendment. He argued that RR/BAYC was expressive appropriation art — a commentary on what he alleged were hidden racist and antisemitic tropes embedded in the original Bored Ape artwork. The argument had some cultural resonance; Ripps published his allegations in a series of social media posts in mid-2022 that generated significant attention and, by Yuga's account, real reputational damage. Whether a jury would have found the defence persuasive is now a question that will never be answered.
The case played out against a backdrop of collapsing NFT trading volumes that made the stakes feel increasingly abstract. At its peak, the Bored Ape Yacht Club commanded floor prices above $400,000 per ape; today, the collection trades at a fraction of that. Yuga itself has contracted — the company that once seemed poised to build an entertainment empire around its IP has pulled back from several product lines, and the broader NFT market has seen platforms retreat or pivot entirely.
That context makes the settlement's non-monetary terms telling. Yuga didn't just want money; it wanted the smart contracts and the domains. In the NFT world, controlling a smart contract means controlling the provenance chain — the on-chain record that buyers rely on to verify authenticity. By acquiring RR/BAYC's contracts, Yuga can either burn the collection or render it inert, removing what it viewed as a persistent source of confusion and brand dilution.
For the broader digital assets industry, the case leaves behind a useful if incomplete body of law. The Ninth Circuit's confirmation that NFTs are goods under trademark statute gives rights holders a clear enforcement pathway. The unresolved consumer confusion question — settled out of court rather than decided by a jury — means the harder issue of how trademark confusion works in pseudonymous, speculative markets remains unanswered. Future disputes will have to litigate that from scratch.
The settlement closes a chapter that began when a conceptual artist decided to test whether the rules of the art world applied to the blockchain. The answer, delivered through four years of litigation and an undisclosed sum, is that trademark law doesn't much care about the medium. An ape is an ape is a good.
