Seth Green’s Bored Ape, an actor, was taken just weeks before the launch his new show with the Ape. Green may have lost the commercial rights to the Ape. He is currently trying to get them back. Actor Seth Green was victim to a phishing attack earlier this month. He lost several non-fungible tokens.
One of the stolen NFTs contained a Bored Ape. According to transaction records it was sold by the scammer for $200,000 to DarkWing84.
Since then, the actor tried several Twitter attempts to get it back. This was especially since the Ape was a central part of a new show Green was working on. Green sent a tweet to the buyer with the same handle, saying “Looks like you bought me a stolen ape- get in touch so we can fix it.” The account has not tweeted in response to the request. It last tweeted in 2021.
“I purchased that Ape in August 2021 and have spent the past several months developing and exploiting IP to make this show the star of this series,” stated Green at VeeCon this weekend. He was literally kidnapped days before he is set to make his global debut.
Green may not have been able to use the Ape commercially after he lost it. In January, Edward Lee, a NFT lawyer, stated that commercial rights were one of the most appealing aspects of owning an Ape. This was because, unlike other NFT collections it could be used worldwide for the purpose creating derivative works.
This license gave NFT buyers unlimited rights for “commercial uses and derivative works of the underlying Bored Ape characters,” wrote Lee in an article that highlighted the reasons the Bored Ape model is so popular.
With hacks such as this, it is unclear if Green’s show can continue or not, and what this means more generally for NFT ownership. The Bored Ape’s new owner now has the commercial rights to it, and laws regarding this are still being developed.
Experts disagree that a stolen NFT transfers the rights to it.
Hot Take: This is absurd. Tweeted Drew Hinkes (adjunct professor at NYU Law). “A thief cannot use his/her stolen rights under the license because he/she isn’t a “purchaser” nor an “owner”. Reminder: digital assets are system powers and not legal rights. “Legal rights are derived from the law.”
replied that James Grimmelmann, another lawyer, had tweeted to clarify the situation.
“Maybe the current owner of Bored #8398 has a license for the copyright. He wrote that they might not. It depends on copyright law, property law, and, most importantly, the interpretation of the BAYC licence. The BAYC license is ambiguous. It’s not appropriate for the purpose.
OpenSea, which is the platform that allowed the NFT to be transacted, has frozen the items Green reported to it, according to a representative from the company.
“Our platform policies, and Terms of Service, explicitly prohibit the use of OpenSea for the purchase, sale, or transfer of stolen and/or fraudulently acquired items,” stated a spokesperson for the company in an email to The Block. He added: “We don’t have the power freeze or delist NFTs on decentralized blockchains. However, we do disable OpenSea from buying or selling stolen items. Our policy is enforced in a variety of ways. These include disabling selling and buying on content violations, delisting and, in certain cases, banning accounts. Green was also provided with this information when he reported the incident at OpenSea.
Green stated at VeeCon, that he is currently working with authorities in order to get his NFT back.
