TL; DR
Full story
If we had to explain this Moonbirds/Yuga Labs controversy, we would put it this way:
Imagine if a company bought the rights to Rock, Paper, Scissors – a game that is in the public domain – and then tried to charge people to play it…
ICYMI: a few months ago, Yuga Labs bought the rights to the Moonbirds NFT Intellectual Property (IP).
At that time, they allowed all NFT holders to use the images in their purchased NFT(s) for commercial gain.
That 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 had been filed under Creative Commons 0 (CC0), a rigid legal tool that waived all copyright claims on Moonbirds NFT artwork, and released the pixelated owl characters into the public domain.
Which, according to copyright lawyer Alfred Steiner, is not reversible.
With all this, 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.
Okay, now you know!