Bored Ape Yacht Club owner uses IP ownership rights to open restaurant | Hacker News Reader

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

hypebeast.com

31 pointsharambae55 comments

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.

On the contrary I've seen many poor people get into nfts to get rich quick.

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

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?

> 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

In the creative arts world, every illustrator is being commissioned to create a brand of NFTs to cash in on the trend and very few break into mainstream success. But that doesn't stop people, rich or poor from trying to speculating on them.

It's not only getting into NFTs, it takes vision to time the buys and sells, just like the stock market. Right now the crypto ecology looks very iffy because most of the profit seems to come from speculation, and the best deals are suspiciously similar to insider trading.

I'm not familiar with this space, but from what I have heard... Aren't we talking about NFT's worth hundreds of thousands of dollars? I don't think it's limited to a group of young kids...

Your post has some tension in it that I can't quite place my finger on. Like you want to succeed like the dumb people but you can't cause you're not dumb? I'm confuses then, are the NFT producers dumb if that's the case? Maybe the king of the dumbs.

NFT's in this realm don't really seem like they add value to much, but I am starting to see the value of NFT's more generally speaking!

Don’t underestimate how ludicrously wealthy some kids are. We’re talking about the kind of people who get a new Lamborghini for their first car at 16.

I see some confusion about what I am saying. I guess people here aren't familiar with rich young adults flaunting their life style on Instagram? I get the confusion because HN is where people like me try to learn things to improve their wealth. I don't see a lot of people born into it here. Perhaps they keep it quiet.

Rich Kids Of The Internet

https://www.instagram.com/rkoi/?hl=en

The tension you detect is probably some resentment on my part. Resentment about kids in high school who had several dirt bikes, horses and swimming pools and got into Stanford or Harvard with a lot of help that I didn't have. I went to public school (U.C. Berkeley) and I had to work at the same time.

I'll work on letting that go.

It’s such a trite thing to say, but clicking that link (to my detriment) really brings it home for me: money can’t buy class.

It's not succeeding like the dumb people, it's taking advantage of them and their inherited wealth

You're still thinking about crypto in terms like "value" and "producers". These are not the right terms. It's a bubble, your rational terminology no longer applies.

A bubble that won't touch floor because organized crime (for example, the Mexican Cartels) use it to sidestep the banks in moving money across nations. The dumb people believing they're investing in NFTs will burst the NFT bubble, but cryptocoins will keep going even if their bubble deflates.

I know exactly what you mean. What people don't realize though, is this idea of creating scams for extracting money from trust fund kids has been around for a very long time, it's called the stock market.

I also think these things perform a very important, and underappreciated roll in society and have a lot to do with the success of capitalism. In the old days wealth would be concentrated in rich families who could use it to hold on to power for centuries, despite their incompetence. Money is power, and the more methods society invents of redistributing that wealth away from people who shouldn't have to those that should, the better.

Edit: That being said, the first movers in the NFT area who are now all rich are definitely not the "dumb" ones, like you seem to be implying.

> 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.

It’s so much worse. NFTs and crypto are seen as a lottery ticket. If you’re near broke, you’re gonna still be poor even if you save a couple hundred bucks… but if you strike it rich with NFTs, you have a ticket out of poverty. Someone else made it rich with NFTs and crypto, and now I’m gonna make it rich with NFTs and crypto.

Bored Apes are expensive but there are NFTs at all sorts of price points.

Agreed with a minor correction.

It's not "Someone else made it rich with NFTs and crypto, and now I’m gonna make it rich with NFTs and crypto."

But "Someone else made it rich with NFTs and crypto, and maybe I'll do it to."

I don't think there's a feeling of certainty that they'll get a big payoff, but the possibility is enough.

They say people play the lottery not to win it, but to entertain the idea of winning. It gives you an escape. Cryptocurrency/NFT, for many people, is just a lottery which doesn't expire at the end of the week.

> 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.

I’m guessing it’s bimodal:

On one end: Cryptocurrency whales trading expensive NFTs back and forth as speculative instruments plus some wash trading to pump the prices. The more hype they generate by spending huge money, the more buyers they can entice to join the frenzy.

On the other end: People who can’t really afford to speculate, but who think NFTs are their only chance to get ahead and secure financial independence. This group consumes the doom-and-gloom financial opinions of Reddit, TikTok, and celebrity politicians who tell them that the system is rigged and they’ll never get ahead. Then NFTs come along and suddenly there are stories of people getting fantastically rich by selling terrible JPEGs of monkeys and squiggly lines. It’s such a dumb idea that the boomers won’t understand it and won’t get to it first like they did with the stock market and real estate. It’s a financial asset made to generate wealth for young people! So they pour a lot of money into it, thinking that they’re either going to get rich or be back to square one with a depleted bank account, which is their baseline mental financial state.

When these people buy NFTs, they’re buying dreams. Maybe it fizzles out, or maybe they’re going to get lucky and have enough money to buy a house with cash in a few months. In their mind, it’s a chance they can’t afford to pass up.

The latter group makes me very anxious. Every once in a while I drop into /r/cryptocurrency to check the pulse and see if things are turning around, but it only gets worse every time I look. It’s baffling to see the posters talk about being down 40% on their portfolios but being convinced that it’s all going to turn around and make them retirement-wealthy in just a couple more years.

What you're missing is how many millionaires/billionaires have been made in crypto. Spending small fractions of your stupid internet money everyone spent the last decade telling you was going to fail any day now, to buy a stupid monkey picture everyone is telling you will fail any day now, starts to look reasonable. Not to mention the venture capital firms with billions to hand out, throwing money at anyone who can make up a whitepaper and ensuring there are vast amounts of money flowing around.

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.

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

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.

> 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

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.

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.

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

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.

cryptokitties is from before NFTs came about isn't it?

They are still NFTs (arguably the first well-known NFTs), as they follow the ERC-721 token protocol.

its one of the first (or maybe the first?) NFTs

> 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.

ii and iii sound revocable if the country Yuga Labs is in puts sanctions against the NFT owner.

Somebody else owns the IP regardless of who owns the NFT, but you're saying that the license is also separate from the NFT?

You own a token.

Fun fact: if you buy a painting or a sculpture, that doesn't usually give you the right to reproduce it for commercial (or any other) purposes either.

Like a CD or DVD or indeed software license then. I am not surprised.

Purchasing the original vs a reprint would.

No, purchasing the original does not grant you the copyright. That stays with the artist unless they explicitly sell it.

Just to show you how untrue your statement is: if you get a tattoo on your body, you don't own any rights to that tattoo -- the tattoo artist does. The tattoo artist of Mike Tysons face tattoo receives royalties anytime it's shown in marketing or on TV.

If you are an actor, the tattoo artist must grant permission to the production for the tattoo to be displayed (otherwise it must be covered up.)

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

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?

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.

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

Or start paying royalties to thief.

“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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

He’s thinking that a bunch of hater nerds like us aren’t his target audience.

He is thinking there is at least one person stupider than I.

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

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

Hypebeast has been a reputable institution in streets fashion/culture for over a decade.

Zero sum.

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.

NFTs and the Bored Apes just seem like a joke that never ends.

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