This is a very specific issue. Let's say you want to take photos of your pet and post them online. Now imagine that photo becomes a viral meme. Eventually, that meme will inspire crypto tokens, rapidly generating hundreds of millions (if not more) billions of) Dollar equivalent.
Soon, your pet will become the most popular cryptocurrency. Soon, she'll make an anonymous trader you've never met a millionaire, but you won't. Soon, descriptions of your pet, some cute and some boring, will be trickling into your girlfriend's closed Discord and Telegram chats all over the world.
You want it all to stop. So what?
Ever since meme coins were introduced, pet owners, willing or not, have been dragged into the depths of crypto culture's biggest excesses. In some cases, the relationship between these pet owners and the crypto community they have inadvertently created can sour. prospered; sometimes they sparked unpleasant tension.
An escalating conflict between cat owners and the cat-inspired cryptocurrency community is currently testing the limits of the fragile relationship between pets and the meme coins that profit from them, testing the limits of the fragile relationship between cats and the meme coins that profit from them. Even so, it could highlight legal avenues pet owners can take to fight back. The legal dark side of cryptocurrencies.
Please enter “Shark Cat”.
Late last month, Solana token shark cat (SC) Amid the rapid increase in pet-themed meme coins, it has started to become a hot topic on social media. dominate DeFi trading. The coin was inspired by the ubiquitous image of a kitten named Nala in a little shark costume, and that photo was used as the core of the marketing strategy.
Soon, Shark Cat exploded, leveraging Nala's fame to rise to a staggering $390 million market capitalization.
Everyone involved was a 1,000x winner. Except of course for Nala and her owner called Pookie.
At first, Pookie was blissfully unaware that his cat was caught up in the ongoing cryptocurrency frenzy. meme coin fever. Then, an Instagram user contacted her earlier this month and offered to pay her $15,000 for the right to use Nala's photo as her unrelated meme coin.
Intrigued, Pookie begins researching the uncharted territory of cryptocurrencies to find out what's going on. She soon realizes that her coin is not the only meme using Nala's likeness. many. At the top of the mountain was a Shark Cat that looked like it could rival the GDP of a small country.
Pookie reached out to Shark Cat leadership. Things started to go south from there.
The token is run by a group of five men who claim they did not start the coin, but simply banded together to keep Shark Cat alive after its anonymous creators abandoned ship. There was found. legal tort The world of DeFi.
Pooky said these men have told her they would be happy to support charities she has worked with in the past. Or you could help her auction off an NFT of Nala's photo, like other pet owners in similar situations. done before.
But Nala was more than just a cat. And Pookie wasn't just a cat owner.
After Nala went viral in the early 2010s, Pookie realized she needed to take control of her kitty's burgeoning fame. She carefully built Nala's brand online and grew her cat's Instagram following. maximum With 4.5 million followers, more than any other cat on the planet. She filed for several trademarks related to cats and created her website. It still sells clothing, toys, and home appliances decorated with Nala's iconic mug.She even began to be successful cat food work.
As a result, Pookie felt strongly that he was being treated unfairly. She told her Shark Cat team she wanted more. She needed “some skin in the game.” They provided her with $3,000 worth of Shark Cat or Solana tokens. At that point she asked to sit down.
On a Zoom call earlier this month (crucially, on that call the Shark Cat team chose to reveal their faces and full names (more on that soon)), Pookie told Shark Cat requested a 10% stake in the company. At the time, this was worth about $20 million.
She also called for a formal handover of control over the project and its direction. Investigating Shark Cat, Pookie discovers a sticker in Coin's Telegram chat depicting Nala with a noticeable erection, brandishing a gun, and gambling. This was a concern for her.
“That's vulgar,” Pookie said. Decryption. “If she writes something crazy about this coin on Telegram and someone who supports our pet food sees it, they'll start questioning who we really are. ”
According to both the Pookie and Shark Cat teams, the Zoom call quickly fell apart. The Shark Cat team said: Decryption This was in part because what they described as “prominent hedge fund figures” participated in advocacy efforts on Pookie's behalf and demanded payment in SOL.
Pookie said the person was a friend of hers who understood cryptocurrencies better than she did and offered guidance. She denies that neither she nor her friend ever asked for SOL. The phone call quickly turned hostile. Pooky said that's when he realized he didn't want Nala's likeness to be associated with the Shark Cat token.
“The moment they raised their voices on our team as we were trying to make things work, it was clear that we would never be able to work with them,” Pookie said. said.
Things escalated from there. Days after the Zoom standoff, the Shark Cat team put together a counteroffer to Pookie for 2.5 million Shark Cat tokens (reportedly worth more than $600,000 at the time), but with no control over the tokens. I didn't make any concessions.In the email you reviewed Decryptionthey told Pookie he had 90 minutes to accept these terms or the contract would be broken.
At the same time, Pookie was talking to a team of yet another cat-related meme coin. This token, White Coffee Cat (WCC), is based on her other cat, Coffee, who has cancer. The WCC team told Pookie that they cared about the cat's plight and wanted to focus the token community on philanthropy and raising money for Coffee's ongoing chemotherapy treatment.
Out of necessity, Pookie agreed to allow Coffee's likeness to be used on the token in exchange for a symbolic 1% stake in the token, worth just $500 at the time.
That's when, in typical cryptocurrency fashion, things went from bad to worse.
When the Shark Cat team learned of Pookie's contract with WCC, they immediately posted a letter online announcing that negotiations with her had been terminated.
Shark Cat team members then mocked Pookie and her team members on Twitter as “greedy opportunistic pigs” and promised to continue the Shark Cat project without her consent.
Sharkcat's owners, delighted by rumors that Pookie was considering legal action, became even more aggressive.
“Fuck you, you can’t sue blockchain!” one crypto user smile.
“They are literally as stupid as the FEC.” [sic] And Gary rolled into one.” Heckled Disparaging references to Pookie and his colleagues as the chairman of the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the foil to the crypto industry Gary Gensler.
Certainly, you can't appeal to the nebulous and virtually meaningless concept of “blockchain.”But as it turns out, you almost surely You can sue another U.S. resident for profiting from your copyrighted work for hundreds of millions of dollars.
Brian Fry, a University of Kentucky law professor who specializes in intellectual property and cryptocurrencies, describes himself as a staunch skeptic of most infringement claims by intellectual property owners.
But even he admits that the facts of the Shark Cat story don't bode well for the Meme Coin team.
I have a shark cat, but claimed that They claim zero legal liability because they have never accepted the name “Nala,” but the token image still includes a photo of Pookie's Nala.it is always used shark cat account On Twitter. That photography is central to Shark Cat's brand identity. This is also a copyrighted work and belongs to Pookie.
That photo, and the meme behind the coin, is integral to how Shark Cat was able to amass hundreds of millions of dollars in value, Frye says. This is a tricky point in copyright litigation. Copyright infringement is often easy to prove, but damages are much more difficult to prove.
“There are pretty reasonable arguments and basically everything [Shark Cat] The revenue comes from piracy,” Frye said. Decryption. “The only reason this meme coin seems to be popular is because it piggybacks on it.” [Nala’s] brand identity. ”
Moreover, one of the biggest hurdles in a typical crypto lawsuit – determining who and where potential defendants actually are – appears to have already been overcome.
During a tense Zoom call with the Shark Cat team, Pookie focused on the team's actual official name for the token. They all left it on the screen as their username. After a quick search of his LinkedIn based on the appearance of his team members, Mr. Pookie quickly discovered that at least one of his Shark His Cat executives lived and worked in the United States. She also lives there.
“There's a lot of money, there's defendants who are available, and it's very easy to prove infringement,” Fry said. “I mean, it’s not great…the fact is it’s bad.”
It remains to be seen whether Pookie will actually try to get all the Shark Cats back in court. She has stated that if she wins control of the coin, she will donate the proceeds to charity.
However, Pookie and the Nala Cat team issued a press release announcing legal action, then sent cease and desist letters to some of the Shark Cat team members and revealed their identities via Zoom.
Meanwhile, the value of the Shark Cat token has plunged 70% since reaching an all-time high less than three weeks ago.
But Frye believes the perfect storm of circumstances that gave Pookie his chance for revenge could have been easily avoided by simply changing Nala's image a bit before linking her to the Sharkcat coin. To tell.
“There's a lot they can do to avoid excessive potential liability,” Frye said of the Sharkcat team. “Obviously that didn't happen here.”
Edited by Andrew Hayward
