OpenSea 'Sitting On Ticking Bomb' As Lawsuits Pile Up Over Stolen Apes (vice.com) 81
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: The NFT marketplace OpenSea is now facing at least three lawsuits over stolen cartoon apes after lawyers for a New York man filed a lawsuit in New York State Supreme Court claiming that his Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT was taken from him due to what he characterized as "security vulnerabilities" of the OpenSea platform. Lawyers unaffiliated with the cases told Motherboard that, whatever the merits of the individual suits, the situation has the potential to cause trouble for the $13 billion Web3 startup, often referred to as the "eBay of NFTs," as it could potentially reveal its inner workings and invite a torrent of other suits that the company will be forced to defend against. "I think they're sitting on a ticking bomb," said Max Dilendorf, a lawyer specializing in digital assets, cryptocurrency, and asset tokenization who is not involved in any of the Bored Ape lawsuits.
The newest $1 million lawsuit, filed on behalf of Michael Vasile, is similar to another lawsuit filed in February by the same lawyers on behalf of an aggrieved Texas man. In both cases, the men say they lost their apes because of alleged bugs in OpenSea's code that the company knew about but did not take appropriate steps to fix. A third ape-related lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Nevada and also naming the NFT marketplace LooksRare and Yuga Labs, the company behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club, claimed OpenSea did not "implement common sense and reasonable security measures'' against fraud and instead put "all the onus" on users. Altogether, the cases against OpenSea and other platforms could prove to be an arena where the courts figure out if the platform or the individual should be to blame when people lose thousands of dollars in a matter of seconds to illicit and irreversible blockchain scams.
Regardless of the suits' merits, the unaffiliated lawyers said the OpenSea suits could place the popular NFT marketplace in a difficult position, as anything less than an all-out victory could invite a spate of similar lawsuits. Dilendorf added that OpenSea had reason to consider settling the case in order to avoid offering up the company's internal emails and documents during the discovery process. "I would not want to open up a Pandora's Box," Dilendorf said. "Because looking at how OpenSea operates the platform from a 10,000-foot view, it's very, very questionable."
The newest $1 million lawsuit, filed on behalf of Michael Vasile, is similar to another lawsuit filed in February by the same lawyers on behalf of an aggrieved Texas man. In both cases, the men say they lost their apes because of alleged bugs in OpenSea's code that the company knew about but did not take appropriate steps to fix. A third ape-related lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Nevada and also naming the NFT marketplace LooksRare and Yuga Labs, the company behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club, claimed OpenSea did not "implement common sense and reasonable security measures'' against fraud and instead put "all the onus" on users. Altogether, the cases against OpenSea and other platforms could prove to be an arena where the courts figure out if the platform or the individual should be to blame when people lose thousands of dollars in a matter of seconds to illicit and irreversible blockchain scams.
Regardless of the suits' merits, the unaffiliated lawyers said the OpenSea suits could place the popular NFT marketplace in a difficult position, as anything less than an all-out victory could invite a spate of similar lawsuits. Dilendorf added that OpenSea had reason to consider settling the case in order to avoid offering up the company's internal emails and documents during the discovery process. "I would not want to open up a Pandora's Box," Dilendorf said. "Because looking at how OpenSea operates the platform from a 10,000-foot view, it's very, very questionable."
Ape (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Ape (Score:2)
It seems obvious that their use of apes for this "cryptocurrency" is ment to be an insult hidden in plain sight.
They didn't lose the "apes" (Score:5, Insightful)
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Many jpgs aren't there anymore, but have been replaced with jpgs of rugs.
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they are.
Re: They didn't lose the "apes" (Score:2)
They should've replaced those .jpgs with a picture of a boot up the ass, which is what those who engage in this "apes" nonsense really need.
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So it's like losing the certificate of authenticity of something that your neighbor owns.
Re:They didn't lose the "apes" (Score:4, Informative)
A NFT owner's rights actually come before the copyright owner,
That sounds entirely like nonsense.
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Well then, I should reroute some of that de-centralized authority to my own pocket.
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Lol no.
Opensea's TOS explicitly says you have no rights to the actual image.
The hilarious thing is they also say that Opensea DO get full rights to literally everything uploaded.
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Check DMCA requests and court precedents.
Can you name even one relevant example?
A NFT owner's rights actually come before the copyright owner, where a purchased NFT owner can file DMCA takedown notices on the artist of a picture.
I could see that, if the terms of sale of the NFT explicitly stated that ownership of the copyright followed ownership of the NFT, and the work was somehow accompanied by a notice which stated that (perhaps embedded in the image's metainfo.) But so far, I haven't actually seen that. Maybe you could cite something.
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the collectible
Just because somebody bought it, doesn't make it collectible. There has to be a market to sell it for that to be true. Used NFTs have almost no value.
The pages were stuck together anyway.
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Technically they didn't even lose the receipt, they just lost the ability to mark it as "transferred" on the blockchain.
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They should compensate him (Score:5, Insightful)
They should compensate him by minting him ten new ones. Would really show how pointless the artificial scarcity of NFTs is.
Re:They should compensate him (Score:4, Interesting)
How do they calculate how much money to award? By the time the trial ends those ape JPEGs will probably be worthless.
Re:They should compensate him (Score:5, Funny)
By the time the trial ends those ape JPEGs will probably be worthless.
"Probably"
LOL.
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How does the court consider lost opportunities? If you had something that was once quite valuable and could have been sold for $1 million, but is now worth $1 and you lost the opportunity to sell because someone stole it, how much can you get from suing them?
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Once there is some way else where money can possibly be laundered, I doubt those apes will stay valuable for long. A GPG signature from a certificate authority to a link doesn't really have much value in it.
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The value at the time of the loss, of course. The value at any other time is irrelevant, because due to the loss, the owner couldn't have sold it any later — they were deprived of that opportunity by the loss.
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That's how they do it with one of the most common cases in the UK: cars being written off.
It screws over the owner because as soon as they buy the car it's second hand or had one additional owner, and the value drops. If it's practically new then it's often almost impossible to replace it with an identical car with a few hundred miles on it, at least not without waiting an unreasonably long amount of time. You can actually take additional insurance to cover that eventuality.
It's been even worse recently wit
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You can actually take additional insurance to cover that eventuality.
In the US, this is called Gap insurance, which covers the difference between value and loan amount.
https://www.iii.org/article/wh... [iii.org]
Re: They should compensate him (Score:2)
Tulip Mania all over again. And even stupider than the last time.
Some people are too stupid to exist.
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Re: They should compensate him (Score:2)
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"I'm going to sue you because you didn't show me an image on my computer!"
Hahahahaha.
What? (Score:2, Insightful)
Talk about an article headline that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Way to go, Slashdot. You've lowered the bar even further.
- Necron69
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> "OpenSea 'Sitting On Ticking Bomb' As Lawsuits Pile Up Over Stolen Apes"
Stolen apes? Did someone break into a zoo? /s
Re: What? (Score:2)
The Stolen Apes whighners belong in a zoo.
Re:What? (Score:5, Informative)
Made perfect sense to me unfortunately. OpenSea is a marketplace for Non Fungible Tokens. The apes in question were those dumb-ass pictures of bored looking monkeys that were sold as NFTs. You literally could not have missed them if you were on the Internet when they came out. As anyone with half a brain could tell you, the whole NFT thing is a giant scam. OpenSea is particularly bad at even trying to make it look legit. Thus, the "ticking time bombs" thing. And the lawsuits.
Perhaps "NFT reseller OpenSea facing lawsuits over security issues" would have been better.
Re:What? (Score:4, Informative)
The ENTIRE point of a summary is that you don't have to waste your time knowing every stupid fad.
NFT reseller OpenSea facing lawsuits over security issues is descriptive and tells the reader everything they need to know.
But I guess articles would rather clickbait the reader unto reading their shitty articles until they realize they are wasting their time. /s
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The ENTIRE point of a summary is that you don't have to waste your time knowing every stupid fad.
But I guess articles would rather clickbait the reader unto reading their shitty articles until they realize they are wasting their time. /s
You must be new here. All Slashdot articles are poorly written with crappy headlines. It's something of a tradition.
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By your definition, even that headline wouldn't be enough, as it assumes the reader knows what an NFT is, though in this environment, it is likely a safe assumption.
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I'm not even sure what their liability is in this case. Under US law (which might apply?), the buyer received stolen property, and so they are the one who gets screwed, then they would sue the person who sold it to them to recoup the money they paid for the item. Likely the buyer would be the one out, the original owner would be able to collect the item back from the buyer, as it was stolen.
As this is the way it works in the art world with art stolen from the Jews during WW2, I am pretty sure it works the
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The seller listed their token for sale. Then it was moved to another address and became non-transferrable. Then after the value shot up that same user moved it back and it was sniped right away because the user didn't cancel the old listing (note that it costs money to list and de-list a token).
To me the user is at fault but the judge might see it differently, either way this will get settled for couch change.
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If that is the case, nothing was stolen, they just sold them at the rate they plugged in when they listed them. That would mean that the headline is entirely wrong in stating they had Apes stolen from them.
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I've been on the internet since the mid-1990s, and the first time I heard about "bored ape" was in relation to NFTs in recent years.
Please don't make the mistake of assuming that the internet has one single cohesive audience.
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I took the (admittedly less than precise) statement to mean that you couldn't have missed them when the Ape NFTs came out. I saw exactly one ape-related thing (music accompanied by what appeared to be a winamp visualization of an ape dancing or playing drums or some shit) before I heard about the Ape NFTs, and I presume it was related but don't remember the details. My lady was listening to the music, which meant the Ape was on our TV.
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But that's what I'm saying, you heard of bored apes in regards to NFTs. Of course it was in recent years, the whole thing s recent. You say the internet isn't a single cohesive audience, but the evidence you present suggests the opposite. You heard about bored apes in the same context, at the same time as everyone else.
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I suppose the plaintiffs (Score:2)
are going apeshit.
Ticking /. apes (Score:1)
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If there's a lower form of life than the person who wastes away their life posting on Slashdot or similar, it's the bottom feeders that troll that person.
Imagine "buying" a NFT ... (Score:4, Informative)
... and being dumb enough to think you "own" the art. You paid for a position in the queue not the rights to the actual art itself.
--
When did Blender Guru start shilling NFTs?
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Ignorance might be number 2, but nobody's smart enough to measure it yet.
You don't understand the purpose (Score:2)
The purpose of the lawsuit is not to get his imaginary property back. He could have just restored from backup.
The purpose of the lawsuit is to establish the legitimacy of the blockchain ledger. OpenSea wins whether they win or lose. If they lose, they move a few bits on a register. If they win, they do nothing. Either way, if the court does not dismiss the case, a precedent is established (in case law) that blockchain entries have real value in the real world.
That fact alone makes the ledger more
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That would be great except for the fundamental difference: cash is fungible. [wikipedia.org]
And NFTs aren't fungible. You know they aren't because it's in the name. So no matter the outcome, the "real-world value" is still nothing. They will never be any more useful than Franklin Mint collector plates, except that you don't need a computer to see the pretty picture on the collector plates. And you can eat lunch on your Captain Kirk collector plate, too.
Re: You don't understand the purpose (Score:2)
At least with FM crap you have something you can take to the pawn shop for a couple dollars.
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Only if you are some kind of crypto bro.
Here is reality. Civil courts adjudicate all kinds of contract disputes. However its the dispute they adjudicate; they don't in most instances go off and explore every other legal aspect of the agreement, unless court spots really obvious problems.
While the fact that any NFT issue was fought over in court and actual money rather than crypto funny money dollars maybe changes hands as result might in the minds of a few lend the entire thing some credence - in legal wor
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I was just reading that some guy lost his bored ape, with a claimed value of $500k, because someone tricked him into trading it away. The trick they used was to create some other JPEGs with the verification tick photoshopped onto them, which made him think that the trading website had verified they were genuine.
Re: Imagine "buying" a NFT ... (Score:2)
He lost his bored ape because it was bored with being around such a useless putz so it ran away.
How Apeaulling! (Score:2)
Yeah, I said it.
All My Apes Are Gone (reprise) (Score:2)
All my apes are gone
And the sky is grey
I fell for a scam
On a Winter's day
My GPU is warm
Hacked on zero-day
Investors are just dreaming
On such a Winter's day
(Original source [slashdot.org].
But I thought... (Score:5, Interesting)
..that one of the BESTEST THINGS EVAR about all things 'blockchain' was that it was DECENTRALIZED. So the big,bad gooberment couldn't come and get you (or some other such nonsense)
Anybody else notice how in each one of these heists...the people who had their shit stolen head straight for the CENTRAL(ized) authorities for help? Typical....I want all the freedom of not being tracked, but if someone does something i don't like, they should be _tracked down_ and apprehended so I can have my ugly ass monkey number back!
I say fuck 'em. You bought a terrible idea and got burned. So what. Nobody cares. Move on to your next tulip and grow the fuck up.
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That has been a good summary of the entire history of cryptocurrency since 2010. Yes, it offers decentralization, distributed transactions, the ability to "get paid, stay paid", and the ability to secure your signatures however you see fit (software, hardware, apps, etc.)
However, there is one downside. It means there is no banking protection, and it is a very common occurrence for someone's currency wallet to get wiped out, with no way to reverse it. People can be conned, hacked, or coerced, or just kill
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Blockchains can be centralized, or decentralized. They're just a signed ledger.
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Re: But I thought... (Score:2)
"Bored Apes", and other such 0 value crap shows just how damaged and lost so many people are these days.
I was watching ST: Picard and it was sad seeing Guinan becoming so disheartened that she was "fuck it" and ready to leave the planet even knowing that it would destroy the idealistic future of the Federation.
Yes, it's just a fictional TV show, but it was a real indication of the general sense of apathy and hopelessness people in this day and age. :-\
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Guinan - Literally the only character more irritating than Wesley Crusher in the entire ST::Universe although Tilly seems to audition for taking the top spot away each new episode of Discovery..
Re: But I thought... (Score:2)
I thought Guinan was very mellow, well until she pulked a shotgun on Picard. :>
But first season Wesley...omg that one really wanted me to tear my own eyeballs out. He wasn't so bad in the later seasons, though could be very irritating once in a while.
It was obvious that during the first season TNG was originally intended to be aimed at young kids, with little "life lessons" and such. But they sort of screwed it up with "The Naked Now" and "I am fully functional" Data. Even after that they
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Star Trek - but TNG especially so has always been a fantasy epic with a scifi veneer. I like Star Trek generally so that isn't a criticism its just an observation. Think critically about the series bookend interactions with Q. Until ST:Picard came a long if you asked a lot of people if ST:TNG was mostly episodic or had long arc they'd have said episodic but that is really because the writers rather masterfully wove sub plots like, everything Picard faces being a response to Q's indictment of humanity witho
Re: But I thought... (Score:2)
We also don't really know why Guinan is such a mortal enemy to Q, or why she was seemingly able to deflect Q's attempt to send her away in "Q Who". I was hoping that after all of these years we will finally get the answer to all of that in the latest Picard episodes. We still might, we just have to wait and see.
soon we will hear (Score:2)
All my $13 Billion! Gone!!
What would Chuck Heston say? (Score:1)
Ape shit stuff lol (Score:2)
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