It’s not much of a secret: When NFTs broke out as a coherent asset class in 2021, their value proposition was, chiefly, rampant speculation. Since then, NFT projects have spent untold millions attempting to pivot their brands towards more serious-sounding, sustainable futures; most opted to go all-in on the ephemeral, provocative concept of intellectual property, or IP.
It has never been resolved, however, what exactly IP means in such a context, nor to what extent NFT projects can bestow IP rights onto their holders. Those unanswered questions bubbled back to the surface this week, when Yuga Labs—the multi-billion dollar company behind Bored Ape Yacht Club—announced that it planned to bestow exclusive commercial rights onto holders of Moonbirds, an Ethereum NFT collection it acquired in February.
There was just one snag with the plan: In 2022, Moonbirds’ original creators filed the collection under Creative Commons 0 (CC0), an extremely firm legal tool that relinquished any copyright claims to Moonbirds NFT artwork, and released the pixelated owl characters into the public domain.
Moonbirds’ official statement on the matter, posted Monday, came across like an attempt to sidestep this reality. “If you’ve made stuff during the CC0 era—cool,” the company wrote. “But from now on, you’ll need to own a Moonbird to keep doing so.”
Twitter users immediately pushed back. Several, including copyright attorney Alfred Steiner, argued the company’s position was legally invalid—Moonbirds were in the public domain now, and nothing could put that toothpaste back in the tube.
I don’t see any way to interpret this other than as saying that something the public WAS freely able to do with @moonbirds artwork will NOW require owning a Moonbird, which of course is false.
— Alfred Steiner (@alfredsteiner) April 30, 2024
It wasn’t long before Yuga appeared to adjust its position. Within hours of the initial announcement, the company’s co-founder and CEO, Greg “Garga” Solano, wrote that…