GameStop 'Falling Man' NFT saga shows people's power at its finest

cointelegraph.com:

A recent nonfungible token (NFT) listing on Gamestop’s marketplace became the center of controversy in the NFT world. The listing received heavy backlash from the community prompting the marketplace to take action within a day, showing how a community can come together to reverse the wrong.

The NFT in question, titled “Falling Man,” showed a man in a space suit falling downwards. The NFT in question had quite a resemblance to the infamous 9/11 photo of a man falling to his death that since has become a defining moment of the deadly attacks. Many believed the NFT was mimicking the 9/11 victim and also infringed on the copyright of the image taken by original photojournalist Richard Drew.

In another discussion on the meme stock subreddit GME_Meltdown, a user pointed out that the figure in the NFT is a render of an existing 3D model of a Russian flight suit created by an independent artist, which was used without the permission of the original artist.

The GameStop team eventually took down the NFT and even banned the creator behind the art from minting on the platform.

Gamestop got rid of the nft and removed the creators ability to mint thankfully. pic.twitter.com/tJpcmXqkJz

The crypto community demanded Gamestop to do better due diligence before approving any artform to its marketplace, where one user wrote:

GameStop didn't respond to Cointelegraph's request for comments at press time.

While GameStop faced the community backlash, the incident opened a pandora’s box of evidence highlighting how NFTs became a medium of making quick money for many at the cost of common human decency.

Related: Scams in GameFi: How to identify toxic NFT gaming projects

OpenSea, one of the most popular NFT marketplaces today, has the “Falling Man” as