With NFTs On The Rise, So Are The Art Thefts
Image via Shutterstock
Art thieves aren’t just walking into museums and getting away with million-dollar masterpieces anymore. With the internet, they’re everywhere—they’re tracing over art and claiming people’s work as their own. The booming interest in non-fungible tokens (NFTs) only pushes creators into murkier waters.
Many might have snickered at a US$120,000 sculpture of a banana taped to a wall a little over a year ago, but in the world of NFTs, that wouldn’t seem out of place. Today, anything can be an NFT, and people would sometimes cough up thousands or millions for it. Jack Dorsey’s first tweet—still visible on his Twitter profile—has raised a bid of US$2.5 million. Meanwhile, a pair of virtual sneakers was sold for US$3.1 million.
The hype around NFTs has egged on some conniving internet users to transform artworks into NFTs, a process called tokenization, without the originators’ permission, VICE reports. There are services on Twitter, like Tokenized Tweets, that allow anyone to easily monetize someone else’s tweets, even those with artworks. And it’s horrifically easy for people to tokenize content that isn’t their own, as they can hide behind anonymous accounts to resell art.
For those that dont know: An NFT is basically a unique bitcoin with an image attached, a tweet in this case. They can be sold and resold by speculators hoping to make money.
— RJ Palmer (@arvalis) March 9, 2021
Now people can sell your tweets all without your permission.
In efforts to protect their work from being turned into crypto art, creators might be forced to lock their social media accounts.
Unfortunately, copyright issues pertaining to NFTs remain complex. Creators can probably file takedown notices for tokenized content, but they won’t be able to do much if the art is already out there in the blockchain’s permanent record. Someone else could already own the NFT, a digital signature of sorts implying ownership.
RJ Palmer, a digital artist who was discovered online and ended up working on the Detective Pikachu movie, took to Twitter to warn others that “any rando can now turn your tweet and by extension, your artwork.”
Palmer told VICE that he was only recently made aware that NFT art collectors had tokenized his artworks as far back as 2018. Luckily, those didn’t sell.
Another artist, Corbin Rainbolt, said that he immediately deleted his old tweets after learning that some of them had been tokenized. The images have since been reuploaded with watermarks.
American copyright attorney told VICE that the good thing is that there’s “recourse for a person who feels their work has been NFT’d without their permission.” However, “the intellectual property considerations get very complex very quickly.”
This might change soon, though, as Rosario predicts that once the big, highly protective guns like Disney decide to enter the NFT world, licensing regulations will likely have to adapt.
Hello all,
— Corbin Rainbolt (@CorbinRainbolt) March 9, 2021
This afternoon, someone tagged a NFT account on my Spinosaurus painting.
As such, I have deleted all my art tweets. I am reposting them here with watermarks.
It's a bit of a gamble for me so retweets are very much appreciated and help me get my art back out there pic.twitter.com/mFABVSozmX
Sharing this excellent and informative infographic made by @cabeza_patata, you can find the original post on their Instagram by the same name (1/4) pic.twitter.com/E0PwS6fQ5f
— Kim Parker (@thatkimparker) March 13, 2021
[via VICE, cover image via Shutterstock]
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