In recent years, digital technologies have taken us to places that were unthinkable decades ago and that could almost seem like something out of a science fiction movie. However, not all the advances seem to be the golden fleece that they promise us and some end up giving rise to strong controversies like this one that has faced the director Quentin Tarantino with Miramax.
And it is that with the growth of cryptocurrencies and this type of transaction, every time we find ourselves talking more and more about the NFT’s, the “Non Fungible Tokens”. In a very simplified way, these NFTs are digital elementsoften references to images, which are theoretically unique and whose ownership is recorded within the blockchain.
And what is the problem?
Despite the fact that large companies and many celebrities have joined in creating their own NFTs, their use is still very controversial and has many detractors, since a large energy consumption is needed for these transactions and the impact on the environment is not exactly small.
In addition to the energy factor, this system has also received strong criticism for its very concept, ambiguous what can come of being the sole owner of a digital image, with the practice often being compared to the fad of buying a star a few years ago.
Ownership of these tokens is not an easy thing to figure out, especially when the intellectual rights of a workand often on NFT trading platforms it is easy to find pieces of art being sold without the author’s consent or knowledge.
And it is precisely because of these intellectual and copyright rights, the director Quentin Tarantino faces a lawsuit from Miramaxwho accuse him of having violated his contract with them.
Last November, Tarantino jumped on the NFT bandwagon like so many other celebrities and revealed that he would soon put several tokens from ‘Pulp Fiction’, his legendary cult movie, up for sale. These NFTs would be images of your handwritten scriptin addition to some unpublished digital scenes and a recording with Tarantino’s comments on his film.
The news was not very funny Miramax, which first launched a notice against Tarantino and then sued him for copyright infringement. Currently, Miramax owns the rights to ‘pulp fiction‘, and as part of the lawsuit the studio also accused the director of keeping his plans to release NFTs from the film a secret.
This lawsuit does not mean precisely that Miramax is against the sale of tokens or that the issue revolves only around intellectual property rights… It is that part of the problem also comes because Tarantino has overtaken them on the left with the release of their “Tarantino NFTs”.
From the study they were already planning to launch their own NFTs of ‘Pulp Fiction’so Tarantino doing it before has interfered with their business plans and they claim it has also devalued the value of any movie tokens that Miramax may release in the future.
“Miramax has the necessary rights to develop, monetize and sell NFTs related to its extensive library of films”, can be read in the lawsuit, where Miramax claims that back in 1993 Tarantino granted the studio all the rights to Pulp Fiction in a way indefinite.
Of course, in the 90s you couldn’t imagine that cryptocurrencies or this type of transaction would emerge, but in this case Miramax would have all the rights to exploit the film in any medium, which would also include digital media and NFTs.
For his part, Tarantino is already working on his own legal defense against the studio. And it is that Bryan Freemanthe director’s attorney, said in a statement that his client’s contract makes clear that Tarantino has the right to manage the releases of his script, and that will include any NFTs he wants to create.