[imagesource: Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge]

The rapid growth of the NFT (non-fungible token) market has opened the door for rampant piracy and fraud.

Scammers and digital thieves are taking advantage of the many loopholes that are presenting themselves in the NFT art world, often selling digital copies of artworks without the original artist’s permission.

These digital thieves are reproducing copies of an artist’s work and selling them in on some of the biggest marketplaces for the burgeoning NFT art market.

OpenSea, possibly the largest NFT marketplace, sees the most trouble.

Aja Trier, selling quirky reimaginings of Vincent van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night’, had to watch 37 of her artworks sold on OpenSea before she was able to convince the platform to take them down, reported NBC News.

Another artist, RJ Palmer, who designs creatures and monsters, had to make emailing takedown requests for his work to NFT platforms a daily routine. But eventually, all he could do was give up:

“It got to be too many. It became this part of my day,” Palmer said, adding that he would constantly send emails trying to get NFTs taken down.

“This is putting so much work on me. I just don’t want to deal with it.”

What’s making it worse is that there is very little an artist can do to stop this rising wave of digital crimes as the systems are still playing catch-up.

On OpenSea, people can create an account and start selling whatever digital images they want to upload:

While that’s helped OpenSea grow rapidly (the company announced Tuesday it had been valued at $13,3 billion in a recent funding round), the platform is barely moderated, forcing artists to actively patrol OpenSea and its competitors to try to get their work taken down.

…Currently, OpenSea’s process to take down sales of stolen images puts most of the onus on the artists. A seller doesn’t need to provide proof of ownership or use their real name to start an auction, but an artist filing a copyright notice has to share personal information like their real name and links that prove they’re the real owner of a work.

If that’s not enough to contend with, many NFT thieves appear to be automated bots that often target artists who don’t even know what NFTs are.

Brian Frye, a professor of intellectual property law at the University of Kentucky, said that since an NFT isn’t an actual image, but rather a receipt or digital deed that points to an image, its sale wouldn’t violate an artist’s copyright:

“All [an NFT] is, is a URL saying ‘Look at this place on the internet,’” Frye said.

“Telling somebody to look at this URL, there’s no copyright infringement there, because no original copyright-protected element of anything is being copied,” he said. “So the NFT itself is just irrelevant to the question.”

Only the image uploaded to and hosted on an NFT marketplace would be in violation of copyright laws.

Meanwhile, digital art platforms like DeviantArt are doing their utmost to scan blockchains used by NFTs to alert users when copies of their work are shown on NFT exchanges, which helps some.

It has already flagged more than 90 000 cases since it started scanning in September, Reuters reported.

But still, the onus is on the artists to fix things.

If anything, what is happening in the NFT art world was happening in the offline art world long before, but it’s been magnified by the scale of the internet.

As DeviantArt’s COO Moti Levy says, NFT technology is really just driving art theft on a “mind-blowing” scale.

[sources:reuters&nbcnews]