NFT owners have zero ownership of their digital arts: report

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

NFTs) owners have zero intellectual property ownership of their content, and only one NFT collection in the top 25 platforms by market capitalisation has attempted to confer intellectual property rights to the purchasers of digital arts, says a report. Most NFT operators «appear to have misled NFT purchasers» about the extent of their rights.

The Creative Commons license, seen as a solution to the restrictive licenses used by most projects, «renders NFT ownership obsolete from a legal perspective as it moves the intellectual property fully into the public domain, making it impossible for NFT holders to defend their ownership rights in court,» according to the report by Galaxy Digital Research. The report mentioned that without improvements in the on-chain representation and transfer of intellectual property rights from NFT issuers to NFT token holders, the expansive vision of Web3 will remain unrealised.

The report analysed major NFT projects, like the Yuga Labs project Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), Gary Vaynerchuk's VeeFriends, World of Women, and social platforms Decentraland and Sandbox. It found that only the 'World of Women' (WoW) NFT collection differentiates itself from all the other top 25 NFT projects by being the only to attempt to transfer full IP rights to NFT holders.

'World of Women' attempts this through the provision of a novel copyright assignment agreement. «Under this copyright assignment agreement, WoW attempts to create a governance structure in which the copyright of each WoW NFT 'runs with' the NFT, such that whoever owns the NFT owns the copyright,» the report mentioned.

NFT holders should fight for their IP rights. «As NFTs are still in their infancy stage, it is critical for the NFT