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The World of NFTs and Their Implications In Intellectual Property Law
NFTs have been all the rage in the world. Mike Winkelmann, a digital artist known professionally as Beeple, sold a collage of his digital images for a record-breaking $69 million. About two weeks later, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey's first tweet ("just setting up my twttr") sold for $2.9 million. Sports icons like LeBron James and Tom Brady have leapt into this market, with a video clip of less than a minute showing James dunking a basketball having been sold for over $200,000. And now, in what many are calling a "social media experiment" that could inspire an episode in the dystopian sci-fi television series Black Mirror, one can buy and sell tokens based on speculating in celebrities' reputations on BitClout, a social cryptocurrency exchange platform.
So what exactly are NFTs, and how do they reconcile with the basic tenets of intellectual property law?
History of NFTs
An NFT, or non-fungible token, is a unit of data based on blockchain technology, which allows users to record and track transactions (such as sales and purchases) as well as ownership of the data on a decentralized, digital ledger. Content creators can "link" NFTs to a variety of works, including art, videos, music, or other digital files. The biggest distinction between an NFT and other forms of cryptocurrency like Bitcoin is fungibility: whereas one can exchange an individual Bitcoin for another, each NFT is entirely unique and not interchangeable. This makes an NFT similar to a collectible item, where the intrinsic value is inherently subjective and depends on how much others are willing to pay for it.
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