A Digital Rock sold for $1.3 million, NFT Trading is booming so is it time to speak about Intellectual Property?

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Last month it was Crypto punks, last week it was Ether rocks, this week it’s Bored Apes, today we look at the future of NFTs and ask a few important questions about their ownership.

When an Ether Rock sold for 400 eth, around $1.3 million, last Monday it marked a new milestone for NFTs. The scarcity of these rocks is what keeps driving up its value. Note that there are only 100 available to collect. This surge in demand for NFTs is set to continue so should we be examining their proof of ownership and ways that we can truly keep this momentum for new found creativity alive.

If you buy, what you consider to be, a truly remarkable collectible and somebody comes along a few seconds later and clicks a button to copy it then you can expect a certain level of frustration. This is not going to go away so how do we tackle the issue that NFTs are easy to replicate, easy to copy, easy to create a hoax out of? Should there be consequences for the copy and pasters? It is possible that in the future all stakeholders will need to be aware of the rights of the legitimate owner of an NFT and with blockchain technology it will be easy to track what address belongs to what NFT. However, as future planners and in keeping with the creative spirits of the NFT community we should consider alternative means of penalties and rewards for the guilty parties.

Just last week Unique Network made a very unique announcement that they were moving to decentralise their NFT marketplace, giving ownership of the marketplace back to the NFT owners. This immediately drove up the price of their collections, Substrapunks and Chelobricks but also demonstrated a true committment to investing in and developing their community. It is both a clever way to build trust with NFT owners but also ensure that all users of the marketplace have a stake in it. We will be keeping a close eye on this project.

Although currently it is pretty easy to copy, download and re-use NFT’s we are only scratching the surface in terms of how NFTs are used. The .JPEG images or GIFs we find with some of the most popular NFTs today may be real estate or characters within games tomorrow.

Lets put a future scenario out to the NFT community – copy, paste, neglect. Will we eventually move on from cases of copy theft to cases of copy-neglect whereby the owner is summoned for not using their NFTs enough? If derelict houses have come under pressure to be used could we ask something similar of NFTs in the future. Similar to the crisis we find in our property world right now. Derelict NFT’s could be given a period of notice and then reused or housed to find the right collector. In this way NFTs will remain alive and kicking. Copyright may be an infringement from the old word of the web, introducing copy-neglect here and now. If you don’t use it you may face some consequences from the NFT community. 

Source: https://www.blockleaders.io/a-digital-rock-sold-for-1-3-million-nft-trading-is-booming-so-is-it-time-to-speak-about-intellectual-property/