The most revolutionary aspect of non-fungible token technology – certification of digital asset and part ownership on the blockchain – has also ushered in a new kind of cybercrime. Thieves scour the internet for digital works of art that are freely circulating online to tokenize and sell as NFTs in markets like OpenSea.
Without delving too deeply into the technicalities of NFT technology, when someone buys a non-fungible token they are basically buying a digital asset that gives them rights to what that token represents.
Often times, an NFT is nothing more than a link to the website that hosts the image the token is linked to. It can be the character of a game, like the famous Axies, collectibles, like the Crypto Punks, physical objects or digital works of art.
The latter have been the preferred target of cybercriminals. Detecting these crimes does not require ingenious plans and the legal risks so far have been small. Anyone can take ownership of someone else’s creation and create an NFT regardless of whether they were the creator of the content or whether they own the copyright to the creation.
Thus, thousands of digital artists, especially those whose creations predate the emergence and popularization of technology, have been robbed daily. According to the DeviantArt blog, a gallery that has created a system to identify rights to digital works of art, its tool to detect improperly minted NFTs has cataloged more than 11,000 stolen pieces that are traded on OpenSea between July and September of this alone. anus.
Rj palmer is a game designer who has developed a parallel career as a digital artist and has several works exhibited in online art galleries, as well as selling them in print in various media.
In an article in the digital magazine Mel Magazine, he says that one day he received an avalanche of notifications from DeviantArt reporting works of his authorship that were being sold on OpenSea:
“Almost all of my work was stolen, from the first pieces I made in 2008. Someone went into DeviantArt, took those works, coined them as NFT and created an account on OpenSea to trade in them.”
Palmer said that it is common for works displayed on the Internet to be copied and reproduced in places never imagined by their creators, But the technology behind NFTs has made their theft and commercial exploitation possible and easy.
This is how much of my work was stolen and minted as NFTs just today. The DeviantArt NFT protection is great but man this sucks to see. pic.twitter.com/uNHinQsAGV
– RJ Palmer (@arvalis) November 23, 2021
These are all my works that have been stolen and minted as NFTs just today. DeviantArt’s NFT protection is great, but man, is that sh * t to know.
Removing artwork from NFT marletplaces is not always easy. In general, the platforms do not have systems to verify authenticity or prevent fraud and are not responsible for the criminal acts of third parties.
Palmer said the “Report” button is not effective. It was necessary to contact the platform by email to notify it and wait for the appropriate measures to be taken.
However, this did not prevent other works of his authorship from suffering the same fate. “People can steal the very image that they have already managed to remove from the platform. There are no safeguards to prevent it,” said the artist.
But not all artists report that their requests have been served by OpenSea. The artist Brittany Fanning denounced on Reddit that she made several requests for the platform to withdraw her works that were commercialized in the market, but all were ignored. Only after he discovered the thief’s contact details and managed to send him a message directly, was the message withdrawn.
As Cointelegraph recently reported, Adobe has created a tool to prove authorship of digital works in Photoshop and other company applications. Through it, NFT creators will be able to link their Adobe ID with their digital wallet, enabling a function for the associated markets to present a kind of verification certificate of the work, proving that it is an authentic and original production.
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