- One of the biggest winners in Yuga Labs’ acquisition of the IP rights to the legendary CryptoPunks NFTs is the group of so-called “V1 Punks” owners, who were embroiled in a copyright DMCA dispute with Larva Labs.
- V1 Punks are the original CryptoPunks, which had a major coding error in 2017. Oops. To fix the error, Larva Labs airdropped new smartcontracts for V2 Punks to the original recipients of the original NFTs. Curiously, the V2 Punks and V1 Punks shared the same image files. The only difference was that the V2 Punks didn’t have the coding error that gave buyers their money back.
- In 2021, some owners of the V1 Punks revived them from the dead, wrapped them in new ERC 721 smart contracts, and started selling them on OpenSea.
- That led to a crazy back and forth between Larva Labs and V1 Punks owners. Click here to catch up.
- Where things stood right before Larva sold the IP to Yuga Labs: Larva would have to file a lawsuit seeking a court order against OpenSea to restrain the alleged copyright infringement by V1 Punks owners. Larva had said some V2 owners had pressured Larva to “take action” against V1 Punks.
- As Hemba a major owner of V1 Punks speculated, the whole V1 Punks DMCA controversy was probably the straw that broke the camel’s back, so to speak. It was a nasty situation for Larva, who apparently was pressured by V2 CryptoPunks owners to fight a copyright battle that Larva didn’t appear willing to fight.
- So what’s the best solution to a nasty situation: EXIT.
- ENTER Yuga Labs, who reportedly told BAYC Discord members that it plans to do nothing with respect to V1 Punks.
