The Bored Ape Kennel Club (BAKC) logo of Yuga Labs has been accused by Easy Drawing Guides of copying or plagiarizing its trademark.
On February 18, the founder of Yuga Labs – Greg Solano announced that he would change the logo design for Bored Ape Kennel Club after being suspected of image plagiarism and copyright infringement from Easy Drawing Guides, a drawing company.
Saw the claims today about the BAKC logo. This was news to us and we’re still investigating the situation. Have reached out to the freelancer we hired for that design and Easy Drawing Guides. We’ll be changing the logo and updating it on our site / ask marketplaces to change as… https://t.co/OwtflDXehz
— Garga.eth (Greg Solano) (@CryptoGarga) February 18, 2023
A day earlier, Easy Drawing Guides accused Yuga Labs of copying its identical “wolf skull” image for commercial purposes.
Thanks for bringing this up @Jdotcolombo. @yugalabs doesn’t have a license to the wolf skull drawing. The intellectual property rights for the drawing belongs to Easy Drawing Guides as it’s our original drawing and protected by our Terms and Conditions.
— Easy Drawing Guides (@easydrawinguide) February 17, 2023
“Yuga Labs does not have a license for this design and the intellectual property rights belong entirely to Easy Drawing Guides. Because this is our original drawing and is protected by us.”
Here are the similarities between the skull design that BAKC took as its logo with the creation of the Easy Drawing Guide.
Solano contacted the freelancer they hired as the designer to investigate the situation. After the announcement from Solano, the skull image has been completely removed from the project profile on OpenSea and temporarily changed to a simple black background logo, before a new design.
The BAKC collection launched in June 2021 and was given a free giveaway for BAYC holders. According to Yuga Labs, royalties collected from the secondary market are donated to animal charities, and BAKC has donated more than $1 million to the work since its inception.
As of press time, BAKC is occupying the top 1 trending OpenSea, with 5,701 ETH trading volume in the last 24 hours. Moreover, the floor price of the collection set a new peak on January 12, reaching 9 ETH.
But this continues to not be the first plagiarism scandal to happen to Yuga Labs. The battle with content creators Ryder Ripps over “borrowing” the BAYC design in the RR/BAYC collection is not over yet.
Synthetic Kyptos
