The people behind the Caked Apes NFT collection were not able to calmly distribute income from sales and decided to take one another to court.
With NFT market sales surging over the past several months, owners and creators managed to bring in tremendous amounts of income. While you’d think that there would be enough funds for everybody, some just want the larger piece of the pie.
The BAYC spin-off NFT collection called Caked Apes has become relatively successful on the LooksRare marketplace. With that being said, the team behind the project weren’t able to distribute the revenue amongst each other peacefully.
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According to the official Caked Apes Twitter account, the project addressed the issue with one of the team members who wanted to take more out of the sales.
The person in question was Taylor Whitley, who, apparently, received his fair share of the revenue from the Cake Apes sale, but was not satisfied with the returns. Caked Apes explained that even though Whitley never created any designs for the NFT collection, he was still reimbursed equally because he was still a part of the team.
However, he saw the success of Cake Apes and reportedly decided to renegotiate his agreement with the project by increasing his cut. Whitley, according to Bloomberg, even took the four other members to court in LA for pushing him out of the project and infringing copyright laws.
Based on Whitley’s lawsuit against his former colleagues, the Caked Apes NFT collection raked in over $2.1 million in sales and royalties. He claimed that the digital assets were his intellectual property and that he and his art agency did not get the agreed-upon sum.
Subsequently, the current team of Caked Apes decided to clap back at Whitley with their own lawsuit against him. According to the lawsuit, they’ve claimed that Whitley had willingly agreed and signed to receive a 10% cut from sales.
The current Caked Apes team assured that Whitley had no hand in the creation of the NFTs, but decided to get a better deal out of his agreement after the collection became more successful.
This might be the first case of team members suing each other over NFT rights. However, it's unclear how the case will go down knowing that the BAYC collection and its spin-offs carry the same intellectual property rights that let them use the NFTs as they please.
