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The non-fungible tokens (NFTs) owners have zero intellectual property ownership of their content and only one NFT collection in the top 25 platforms by market capitalisation has attempted to confer intellectual property rights to the purchasers of digital arts, says a report.
Most of NFT operators “appear to have misled NFT purchasers” about the extent of their rights.
The Creative Commons license, seen as a solution to the restrictive licenses used by most projects, “renders NFT ownership obsolete from a legal perspective as it moves the intellectual property fully into the public domain, making it impossible for NFT holders to defend their ownership rights in court,” according to the report by Galaxy Digital Research.
The report mentioned that without improvements in the on-chain representation and transfer of intellectual property rights from NFT issuers to NFT token holders, the expansive vision of Web3 will remain unrealised.
The report analysed major NFT projects, like the Yuga Labs project Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), Gary Vaynerchuk’s VeeFriends, and World of Women, along with social platforms Decentraland and Sandbox.
It found that only ‘World of Women’ (WoW) NFT collection differentiates itself among all the other top 25 NFT projects by being the only to attempt to transfer full IP rights to NFT holders.
‘World of Women’ attempts this through the provision of a novel copyright assignment agreement.
“Under this copyright assignment agreement, WoW attempts to create a governance structure in which the copyright of each WoW NFT ‘runs with’ the NFT, such that whoever owns the NFT owns the copyright,” the report mentioned.
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NFT holders should fight for their IP rights.
“As NFTs are still in its infancy stage, it is critical for the NFT community to begin working on a framework to properly give out IP rights to users before mass adoption,” the findings showed.
