TL;DR
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If we had to explain this Moonbirds/Yuga Labs controversy, we’d put it like this:
Imagine if a company bought the rights to Rock, Paper, Scissors — a game that is well and truly in the public domain — then tried to charge folks to play it…
ICYMI: a few months back, Yuga Labs bought the rights to the Moonbirds NFT Intellectual Property (IP).
At which point they allowed all NFT holders to use the imagery featured in their purchased NFT(s) for commercial gain.
Which sounds like a nice gesture — and, in a vacuum, it is!
The only problem in this particular situation was that before Yuga’s purchase of the Moonbirds IP, it had been filed under Creative Commons 0 (CC0), a rigid legal tool that renounced any copyright claims to Moonbirds NFT artwork, and released the pixelated owl characters into the public domain.
Which, according to copyright attorney Alfred Steiner, isn’t reversible.
With all of that, Yuga Labs quickly walked back some of its previous statements, clarifying that Moonbirds-related commercial rights would only be attached to new, 3D versions of the Moonbirds artwork.
Alright, now you know!
