WilmerHale is representing conceptual artist Ryder Ripps and Jeremy Cahen in a suit filed by Yuga Labs, the creators of the “Bored Ape Yacht Club” collection of non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Ripps created a series of pieces as part of his artistic criticism of Bored Ape Yacht Club, emphasizing his message about racism and other problematic imagery and symbolism in the Bored Ape Yacht Club collection. Ripps and Cahen were subsequently sued by Yuga Labs, which alleges trademark infringement.

The team representing Ripps and Cahen is led by Louis Tompros and includes Henry Nikogosyan and other WilmerHale attorneys, alongside Alfred Steiner of Meister & Steiner PLCC.

Tompros previously represented artist Matt Furie in enforcing his intellectual property rights to end the misappropriation of Pepe the Frog by the “alt-right.” The WilmerHale team and Furie successfully stopped use of Pepe by Richard Spencer’s AltRight.com, Arktos Media, Baked Alaska, the r/The_Donald Reddit forum, and neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer, among others. Tompros also helped Furie achieve a settlement against Alex Jones’s Infowars, ending the copyright infringement lawsuit over Infowars’s unauthorized sale of merchandise featuring Pepe. The fight to reclaim Furie’s work from the alt-right was the subject of the Sundance and Emmy award-winning film Feels Good Man, in which Tompros and WilmerHale attorney Stephanie Lin were featured for their work on behalf of Furie.