The world has definitely changed thanks to the internet. A photographer, Cath Simard, has managed to decipher the NFT market and has sold one of her most famous photographs, and shared on the network, for $ 300,000. Tired of seeing that copyrights were not respected, it has achieved one of its best sales.
Surely many of you are right now like the one who writes these lines when you try to discover how the world of NFTs works. Xataka’s teammates have explained it to perfection. But deep down we don’t understand it:
NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) are digital assets that are basically an extension of that same idea. Before we conferred value on tangible goods that we could touch and see (gold, stamps, works of art), and now we increasingly do it on intangible goods that we mostly see, but probably cannot touch.
Cath Simard has sold a unique, indivisible, indestructible, verifiable, and wholly owned digital copy of one of her Hawaii photographs. And for $ 300,000. The most incredible thing is that immediately after the sale we can find it free and We can download it, in any size, for any commercial purpose without attribution (Although the author is grateful for her name).
The story of a photograph for history
She is a landscape photographer. From his native Canada, he has traveled the world in search of the most spectacular images on earth. Her nights out stand out and that many times she is the model that appears.
One day he took a picture in Hawaii. A road leading to the mountains with cloudy skies. That image went viral and began to be shared without respecting copyright. You only had to put ‘Hawaii highway’ in the search engine and it appeared among the first.
Tired of losing money with every unauthorized download decided to study the market and get down to business. And he shaped the #FreeHawaiiPhoto project:
This project originated from the idea that virality and the extensive use of an image in the physical and online world increases the importance of provenance and, therefore, the value of the NFT. #FreeHawaiiPhoto is also a statement to regain control over the use of our images and fair compensation.
He put photography on the NFT market and contacted a prominent collector who wanted to bet on the experiment. At auction it was advertised as ‘The first NFT to have its usage rights released to the world after purchase’.
From September 20, 2021 the photograph can be downloaded for free as stated on the official image page:
- All versions of #freehawaiiphoto can be downloaded and used for free by anyone around the world.
- All versions of #freehawaiiphoto can be used for both commercial and non-commercial purposes
- Permission is not required to use #freehawaiiphoto (although attribution is appreciated and will allow us to promote its use on this website and on social media)
The idea is simple. If an image is viral, someone may be very interested in having a unique digital version of that photograph. And the more viral it is, the higher its price. It is that simple and why not say it, strange, especially for those of us who still value physical things, what can be touched.
It must be recognized that it has been a master move and that it opens the way to a new way of understanding the market and copyright. We will be attentive to see the path that this way of selling photography follows.