There was a moment, in this same year 2021 (year of the explosion of the NFTs) when it seemed that NFTs would be a great complement so that artists could bring their work to the public.
We just have to remember the artist Pak and his collection ‘The Fungible Collection’ that raised 16.8 million dollars being a simple gray pixel his star work. Or how the crypto artist Beeple starred the first auction of digital art at the prestigious auction house Christie’s with the collection “Every day: The first 5,000 days”.
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“They keep stealing my art to make NFT”
However, just a few months after these milestones, the picture looks much different for artists: taking into account that you can create an NFT of anything for as little as 120 dollars (about 106 euros)They are seeing their creations being stolen from them.
Liam Sharpy Sharp announced on his Twitter that “unfortunately I am going to have to completely close my DeviantArt gallery, since people keep stealing my art and making NFTs“and he also complains that he cannot report each of these cases and that this problem is” constantly ignored. ”
Sadly I’m going to have to completely shut down my entire @DeviantArt gallery as people keep stealing my art and making NFTs. I can’t – and shouldn’t have to – report each one and make a case, which is consistently ignored. Sad and frustrating. pic.twitter.com/oNH6yXQtyU
– Liam ‘Sharpy’ Sharp (@LiamRSharp) December 17, 2021
What do the platforms where NFTs are sold that copy original works do
Although Sharpy’s work is not recognized and has little value when sold, it seems that the trend in the NFT world is search still virgin works of unknown artists and they trade with them on OpenSea, which this year received money from investors, and other crypto platforms that emerged with the NFT fever to facilitate their sale. So this artist was not profiting from his work but a user named 7D03E7 on the aforementioned platform.
Sharpy himself used his Twitter account, tagging OpenSea to remind them that “there have already been many” times when his works have been taken. And remember that “the reporting process is not intuitive, and the responsibility of proving that I am the artist / owner / creator rests with me, which seems wrong to me, that if I find out. The creation part of NFT should be more rigorous. “
To find out about these copies, Deviantart has a tool, DeviantArt Protect, which is an image recognition software that is expanding its reach beyond its own platform and now scans public blockchains and third-party markets for possible art infringements in form of minted non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Not all NFTs are coined by the actual owner of the art, allowing others to sell and benefit from the hard work of the artists, according to the website itself explains.
To all this, the founder and lead developer of Ethereum Name Service, or ENS, Nick Johnson considers that the reaction in this respect is “exaggerated” because the NFT collection has “zero sales.” This is the equivalent of someone publishing a job on his Facebook without attribution: shit, and probably illegal, but not a real threat of any kind“, according to his words.