Yuga Labs recently announced the release of its much-awaited intellectual property licensing deal for Meetbits and CryptoPunk NFTs holders earlier this week. Yuga Labs first acquired the collections from Larva Labs earlier this year in March, teasing the licensing deal. 

Finally, after the release of this deal, the NFT owners of CryptoPunk and Meetbits will have the same IP rights as BAYC NFT holders. The deal will give the NFT holders full commercialization rights for the creation of products and projects based on the NFTs. 

Why is having Intellectual Property Rights important for NFT holders?

Some of the BAYC NFT owners have already been using their NFTs or IP in projects. For example, Seth Green, the American actor, producer, director, and writer, is launching a show on his NFT. Interestingly, Seth reclaimed his stolen ape avatar NFT by spending over $300.000. 

Another good example of the use of IP is shown by Andy Nguyen, the restaurateur who opened a Bored Ape-themed restaurant called Bored & Hungry in Los Angeles in June 2022. These are some of the example use cases of NFTs with IP rights. However, the possibilities are endless. 

After the release of the deal, Yuga Labs will still own the IP, and NFT holders can license it. It is also interesting to note that, in a previous scenario, Larva Labs was criticized for handling IP licensing differently and still retaining the intellectual property rights of the collection. As Yuga Labs is also still retaining the ownership, an NFT holder protested against this decision by selling their CryptoPunk NFT. 

Other NFT collections have taken different approaches to handle IP rights, such as Moonbird’s NFT switched to a public domain usage model earlier this month. The project adopted the Creative Commons CC0 copyright code, which offers access to anyone to commercially reproduce and use art from Moonbirds and Oddities. 

However, this step also faced backlash from the holders as they had hoped to own exclusive rights to their NFT.