NFTs & Copyright: Problems and Opportunities!

Non-Fungible Tokens are a way to store digital ownership records in a blockchain 'ledger'. But new opportunities come with new problems. Artists are now contending with false copyright ownership claims from 'tokenization' of their works.

#NFTs #Beeple #Copyright

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[AJMansfield]

NFT's are basically buying and selling "first" comments on YouTube videos. They're worth exactly nothing.

[strredwolf]

Have an artist's perspective (as well as author -- I draw sci-fi/furry artwork and I write fiction):

This scares me. This was sprung up out of the blue, with people just tokenizing things w/o permission. I've banned the tokenizer on Twitter but who's to say that they tokenize a work that I've posted on a third-party site (Fur Affinity or Deviant Art for example)? *HOW* is it tokenized?

I still have the master file for the digital presentation... in fact, I have the original pencil-on-paper SKETCH! What if it's tokenized w/o my permission and sold but I have the original and can prove that I did not give permission for this?

Do I have to start tokenizing everything, all my artwork dating back to 1994?
Do I have to mass-copyright everything now, at considerable expense? I got thousands of pictures and pieces of fiction! I'm still selling collections of my web comic (which I have to get back to).

I'm not the only one. This is being discussed along forums and posts on Fur Affinity, Deviant Art, and other art gallery sites.

I get the feeling that this will be a very massive copyright violation tool, and it's going to kill the creativity of us artists and authors. How do we protect ourselves where we grew up in a copyright realm that you didn't need to register it until that rare instance that something bad happens?

[random]

People can make new NFT chains like candy, trying to regulate them will be a nightmare. You can also make NFTs out of anything even if they dont own the copyright for it. And with the boom now, we are going to probably have a spree of copyright infringement. However most infringement will be on random internet artists who wont be notified someone is selling their art as an NFT and who probably wont have much of a claim because the value of NFTs vary wildly and unless they already registered the copyright at the copyright office (which most small timers dont do), the infringers would only be liable for actual damages.

[dbldekr]

This is the meme version of naming a star after someone or buying land on the moon

[sharkinahat]

In essence it's someone writing down somewhere that someone else owns something, without actually checking if it's true - but in a hi-tech way? Looks shady to me.

[RedRocksies]

As artist, this really, really scares me... :( there have been already bunch of cases where art has been stolen and tokenized, not just tweets... currently there's little to no checks at all if you actually own what you are about to tokenize. This whole thing seems to be art thieves paradise.

If tokenization/minting suddenly becomes something legit which holds up to law to prove full ownership, there better be some really, really high quality checking and bureaucracy behind it! and a reasonable way to dispute those false ones that get past it!

[Christopher_Gibbons]

We know exactly how it will play out before a judge.
Judge: "What governmental body granted them authority over ownership rights?"
Claimant: "nobody"
Judge: "case dismissed with prejudice, and I have instructed the bailiff to rough you up a bit in the way out."

[prunabluepepper]

Blockchain, the marketing word that allows for 500% price raise offers no reasonable efficiency and has never actually solved a problem.

[Madman]

As far as I can tell NFT's are basically a really wasteful way of printing a note saying "I own this", with about as much authority.

[timogul]

I think the technology has some value to it, but I think that the current implementation of it as a way to speculate on the value of digital works, is nonsensical. It is just a bubble that people will waste money on until it bursts. An NTF of an image file is not ownership of anything more than a contract. You are not purchasing an image, you're purchasing a certificate of authenticity. It's basically just a casual Notary statement. The image itself you get as a free bonus, but everyone else gets an absolutely identical copy of it.

[wbalvanz]

So, if anyone can claim an NFT for content that they find, and did not create, and it is on the true owner to dispute this activity - how is that lawful, legal, or right?

There has to be some legislation in place immediately to stop claim jumpers, right? If my art becomes a commodity for someone else to profit from behind my back, what am I supposed to do?

[darkspells]

From what I understand, the creation of an NFT does come at a cost of some amount of the currency for the blockchain in question. Most all of these high profile NFT's have been made on the etherium blockchain

I kind of feel that this will not actually have any significant impact on copyright law. After all if I were to start a company that kept track of the ownership of land in the United States, but allowed anyone to make claim to any land, whether or not they have proof of that ownership, the validity and authority of my records would be essentially moot. You couldn't use my records to make a legal case for your ownership. I would assume the US government would simply not consider these transactions valid due to how little backing they have to assert their authority.

[DahVoozel]

"How many different block chains you tokenized with, mon?" - In Living Color reference only three people will get.

[dusparr]

at the most basic "layman" level the NFT acts as an updating List of Ownership of Hashes

The actual problem is that the NFT isn't intellgent enough to equate small differences
"and all the kings men"
"and all the king's men"
are wildly different objects to the NFT; and this is true of pictures as well, I could just take the .PNG that one of the artists has made (and tokenized even) and make a .jpg (or a lossless version) of it and tokenize that and the NFT will record that the PNG of file with X (which is different from the original .jpg file's Hash Y) is owned by me and no one would be able to tell.

it gets even worse; JPG aren't lossless, so they put in artifacts. Each time you generate the JPG, you can generate different artifacts.
Every JPG with different artifacts are slightly different.
Every one of them can have different owners

[jamisonw.]

Just realized that cute chonker cat looks a lot like the cat with black spot that looks like another cat.

[Spiderboydk]

Would a false ownership claim be a kind of conversion?

[TheOneWhoMightBe]

At some point someone is going to create a NFT that claims entire blockchains in one fell swoop.

[jamisonw.]

I'm really glad to hear from you about NFTs, I feel like a lot of creators who are talking about them have dollar signs in their eyes so it's hard to trust their acceptance of them in light of these artists getting ripped off and the environmental effects. Your explanation here really puts the details in an objective light which I appreciate.

[Mechristopheles]

This is exactly the same manufactured interest that was the 1990's collectible comics bubble. It's panic speculation.

[StormsparkPegasus]

It's pretty obvious going by what has been "sold" thus far that this is just a creative new way to launder money.