In a shocking news in the NFT space, the developer of Meta Bots has been accused of stealing the artwork for the Bots. The Bots are allegedly based on the works of artist Pablo Stanley.
The incident came to light after Satvik Sethi took to Twitter to talk about the alleged “scam”. Sethi is the Founder and CEO of Runaway, a social entrepreneurial venture promoting mental health. He is also an NFT collector.
What happened with Meta Bots?
Meta Bots is a collection of 10,000 randomly generated space robots that dropped late last month. Each NFT costs 0.01 ETH and was sold out “pretty quickly”. However, the developer allegedly stole the artworks for the bots from Stanley’s sketch library.
“It is now clear that one of the biggest scammers in the NFT space is the guy behind @metabotsio and @nftfuckbubbles,” Sethi tweeted on July 10. “But it has just been revealed that he actually blatantly stole all the artwork for Meta Bots from an artist’s Sketch library.”
According to a screenshot that Sethi shared, Stanley had created the robot illustrations years ago. As per the sketch library that features Stanley’s original artworks, users can create robot illustrations using his sketches.
The site also says that the sketches are “free for personal and commercial use.” While it’s clear that Meta Bots did not credit the artist while selling the NFTs, we are not yet sure if it counts as stealing.
“Just now, @pablostanley joined our discord and informed us that he was just learning about Metabots and his art was taken and published as a collectibles project without permission,” Sethi tweeted. He added that the incident was “appalling”.
Sethi added that the Meta Bots developer allegedly sent “passive aggressive” messages on Discord and eventually stopped communications.
A week later, the developer allegedly returned to tell the members that he was working on “something bigger”. He also allegedly changed his Discord to “Zero Fucks Given”, before disappearing again.
Meanwhile, today, Meta Bots responded to a tweet seeking support for Stanley. “Of course he is the creative genius behind the ‘bot parts’ that meta bots then assembled and introduced to the NFT community,” Meta Bots wrote.
NFT community comes together
As the debacle unfolded, Sethi set up a new server on Discord to bring together existing Meta Bots owners. Together, they will create a new project and decide on the next steps. Stanley is also part of the new server.
Currently, the plan is to burn two bots for one new bot, Sethi said. In this way, half the supply will go to Meta Bots owners and half will profit Stanley. Sethi has also called on community leaders to amplify the issue.
While the NFT industry has grown in leaps and bound in the last couple of months, several controversies have also popped up. In May, for instance, a user had sued the CEO of Dapper Labs, the company behind NBA Top Shot, for selling unregistered securities.
Most recently, rapper Jay-Z had sued his former partner Damon Dash for allegedly trying to sell an NFT of his album ‘Reasonable Doubt’. Later, the court had ruled in Jay-Z’s favour and prevented Dash from selling the NFT.
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