NFTs and copyright: challenges and opportunities

Abstract

The attention paid to blockchain technology has always been shadowed by the ever-popular Bitcoin. Bitcoin is not the only life-altering outcome of the blockchain revolution. Each day we come across another useful aspect of blockchain technology: first, it was smart contracts, then initial coin offerings, then security token offerings and, since the beginning of March this year, there has been a lot of hype around non-fungible tokens (NFTs). While different digital art and collectibles are tokenized and sold for mind-boggling amounts, there are some legal questions, including regarding copyright law, that need to be tackled. This article will develop as follows: In Part II, we first describe the main characteristics of blockchain technology, and its important features that impact NFTs. Then, we consider where NFTs should be classified within the different groups of tokens. We define NFTs and consider why they are so popular nowadays and how they interact with smart contracts. In Part III, we discuss the legal implications of NFTs in general and with a focus on some problems that arise in copyright law mostly on the qualification of minting and selling and the consequences of purchasing an NFT.