Topic: NFT and art theft (Read 508 times)

This is an aspect where NFTs are really struggling, after all we already have copyright laws that protects intellectual property from theft, it is true that with that law it is impossible to distinguish between an original and a copy, but in the case of NFTs you cannot tell if the person selling the BFT is in fact the legitimate owner of the art being sold, they are the owner of the NFT but that does not necessarily prove they have legal ownership of what they are trying to sell.

This is why it is too early to speculate NFTs, as there is simply too much left to guessing to know if what you are buying will have value over the next years or if you actually own what you bought.

Some sort of a bit rubbish kind of trend i would say yet i dont really believe that much those arts are really having that value which is out of this world.For NFT games then it would consider it out to be somewhat

revolutionary compared into those arts which is utter shit. Expect that there would be people would simply make out some shitty arts and then tend to sell it out and some would be stolen up.

These things wont really be that able to avoid on any market as long there would be some sort of trend or something like that.

The IRS has given tax guidelines for theft this year and any stolen goods must be accounted for and taxes paid on them as gain.  I hear the NFT crowd is quite happy that the IRS will be going after taxes for stolen goods as that should deter others from stealing their artwork without paying for fear of the additional taxes.

In short, if you right click and saved any NFTs this year, you have to pay the taxes on the stolen merchandise.  Be careful next time you want to right click and save an NFT, it could come with a costly tax bill from Uncle Sam.

/sarcasm (that means I'm not being serious)

The whole issue with NFT art is clumsy to me, just  pick a random art and put on blockchain, then attach some hype and rig the sales so as to look for who to buy the with a very high price. I feel the whole NFT market is still not well organized.

it's like a grave for the real artist that have been sharing their art all over the internet publicly.

those thieves are indeed now unstoppable and that is a serious problem that NFT couldnt fix it.
any solution to this? i dont think so.
freakin money beat everything right? those greedy thieves mptherfuckers did really not giving a single fuck about this .. just making money and disappear. is it an art as well? to disappear ? lol

It's a colossal waste of money that became a thing because a bunch of quasi "celebrities" figured out they had more money than sense and starting spending obscene amounts on this useless virtual trash instead of contributing something good to the world - like donating it to productive charities. Then a whole load of their followers decided that to become celebrity clones they should buy up more cheaper versions and maybe even be able to flip them to a bigger idiot later down the line. Now it seems that thieves and scammers are stealing designs owned by other people, who never gave permission for republishing, in order to sell them as unique NFT's - ironically selling "ownership" rights to art or photos that they never owned. It's an all round unnecessary mess, a few people got rich by selling this junk but most of the sheep got poorer.

as the OP said that NFT has failed to protect the creations of artists and allows thieves to freely copy other people's works

For now, NFT marketplaces such as Opensea and others have not been able to protect the work of creators and this proves that the NFT concept is not perfect and there are still many shortcomings, only bitcoin has no weaknesses

I have seen more people doing this and stealing the artworks of other people, as far as I know, NFT is created to be the evidence for the owner to prove that they are the only own that they really own the artwork and this artwork can be a simple picture, gifs or even a piece of music. But the problem with not is everyone can easily clone and copy other people's work and after some editions put it for sale once again and earn money from it or there are even some other people who try to sell a fake copy of people's work. I'm not sure how to be there should a way to report these kinds of cheaters can scammers to protect the ntf creators.

NFT is advertised as the first solution to ownership of digital items, and yet it fails at that, because such abuse is both possible and easy to make. Bitcoin was created to solve the problems of trusting third parties that can abuse their power, and to this day that has been no single such incident in Bitcoin network, NFT claimed to do the same with digital items, and it's clearly not working.

Well you see, that is the problem. When people are given the freedom to do what they like, they start to misbehave sometimes. NFT is free to create and anyone can just create an account on the platform and within a few minutes or so,they are done creating their own NFT on the platform and it will be available for people to start bidding on it. They would claim that they are the ones who own the full right to the NFT that they have created, while they don’t even have any right to it at all.

But, there is nothing you can do to these people, you don’t even know who they are because their identities are hidden. So the artist just did the best thing he can do at the moment which is shutting down his online store so that he can prevent further theft of his artworks from happening.

Using a singular act from a desperate developer to condemn a full project is been sentimental. The problem isn't with NFTs but those bought by greed who go about stealing a work that isn't theirs and converting them for NFT tokens without any plan on negotiating with the original author or making any form of compensation. But I still think it's wise to closely monitor this any NFT project before investing ensuring it's an original work of the artist.

If NFT has the same problems as real art? then what's the point of an NFT? NFT promoters say that it's a revolution that will change everything, but it can't even deliver the most basic things. And we shouldn't so easily give benefit of the doubt to all new trends, that's how scammers make millions.


Yes, it's very useful. For scammers.

As for NFTs and artists, I'm not sure that everything is so bad and that NFTs themselves are kind of a dummy. The fact is that in the real world, the same paintings are also very often stolen, or, for example, the original is forged and sold. That is, there is also a problem. The emergence of NFT is a new vision and no one says that everything works 100% reliably or correctly, since there will always be craftsmen who want to spoil something. I still think that NFT is an opportunity to make access to the use of art easier and better, but for this you need to go through the path of technology formation and its improvement. Who knows, maybe in the future NFT will be the best solution for storing and using different values. But the fact that there are nuances, they are everywhere and always will be.

Obviously NFT technology is very very useful, it basically is the first use case of blockchain which has spread so widely into the real world economics and almost every one thinks it's very useful. Not only in terms of metaverse, in general also NFTs are going to be too popular due to their quality of storing digital art in a very secured form. Gaming, music, video industries are going to run on NFT only in the future.

This has been a type of situation where people keep talking about for a while now. I am not saying that it is not happening, but when there are so many wrong things going on with the crypto NFT world, this could be the least of the worries. Let's be honest, if an NFT doesn't have a purpose, it is usually manipulated and as long as that stands true, we are going to have useless NFT's going for insane amount of money.

Even artists are on it right now, whales find artists who are not know too much but have good work, pay them a fee, then artist creates NFT out of his art, then whale buys a few for millions of dollars, artist give it back, then suddenly artist is one that sold his stuff for millions of dollars. All those people stuff are very wrong and fake, people should not invest accordingly. I get the Axie stuff because you use it, but others are just useless. So, stolen or not, they are all worthless unless I can use it somewhere.

Well, this is a pretty sad fact. We think that NFT can help the artists out there, but irresponsible people sometimes take advantage of this flaw to their advantage. however, this is a fairly serious problem in the art world. although we may think that the world of NFT is wide, but this cannot be underestimated. well, maybe it's still in development stage, so I hope that this has a solution soon.
I know that currently NFT has many benefits, but we know that NFT is also included in the art world. if this is the case, it is possible that in the future, quite a number of people will take other people's art and claim it as their own. just imagining this is pretty sad. well, but I hope, the solution of this can also be solved, even though it's actually difficult in the art world. if it's the NFT that has the functionality, it looks like it's still fine at the moment.

NFT technology has been so overhyped over recent months, but I think that people are starting to realize that.

It is nothing but a gimmick that is designed to enrich the founders of each project.

They claim that it represents ownership of assets, which is true, but what good is that when the asset itself can be infinitely created out of thin air?

Just a blind market where we are buying something that we don't know who is actual creator of the art, on most cases the seller could be the owner but owning an NFT doesn't mean we own the art as well so its just a market here for now reason and hyped by some people with random arts and spend millions on it just to boom it in the beginning nkw everyone says buy an NFT then you eill become rich.

Why be surprised, cryptocurrencies existed and we don't have any qualms with it. I think that as long as one has money and someone can convince enough people that this digital piece could be worth as much as their asking price then probably someone out there's definitely going to pay for it. NFT is just Fine Arts in Digital form.

It's definitely unfair for the owner of the art because to be honest, creating different arts for isn't that easy. I guess it would be better if NFT developers would buy it straight to the owner to make things fair. The art might only be a small part of the whole NFT but it's a big deal for the artists because they worked hard for it. I hope people who steal artworks would get punished.

The theft is also just a copy and for true collectors, a copy will have absolutely no artistic or collectible value and collectors would certainly prefer to relate more to the original version, a work that comes from the author's own hands, not the hands of a thief, I don't understand why there are artists who are not confident in the original version and worry that what they create will be copied on the NFT space. NFT is just a name created to enhance value and make money, compare to actual art paintings, it's two false stories, buyers on NFT are just investors while buyers on art value are collectors, need to distinguish

I always knew something like this would happen and there is right now no way to stop people from stealing from others and making it into an NFT and claim it as their own. This is sad. But I am sure eventually there will be some sort of validation check that will somehow be able to able to find out if the NFT has been made by the original owner or not.
At least deviant art is warning their users if people are stealing their artwork and selling it as their own. I wonder how many stolen NFTs are out there in the market.

That's on you but I think that if NFT people found another utility besides the community, I think that we would probably see something bigger plus the advent of virtual space for profit is starting to get more traction as time goes by and I am pretty sure that we are going to see more of them hoping to be the next big thing.

100% agreed.

I wouldn't call NFTs useless, although I do think that in its current form, it is no better than a speculative token.

I think that people hype the term up too much as well. The technology honestly isn't even that groundbreaking - everyone knows that having your own token on ETH was always possible, it's just that now there is an image attached to it.

When a technology is used for nothing more than investment scams, it just means that the technology itself is useless. Crypto in general is scammers paradise, because it can be hard to trace, it's impossible to fully regulate or stop. The only thing that can be done is governments telling exchanges to delist shitcoins and tokens, basically regulating them like the stock market, though scammers will just keep using various smart contract blockchains to sell their tokens.

It all won't stop with NFT, in a year or two there will be a new hyped trend with tokens/blockchain/smart contracts, and a lot of people will lose their money in the end.

It's because you have the rights to that piece of art, not only the piece of art itself. No one can prove they own it in the same chain unless the one who truly owns it.

Nope. Their point of existence is to reveal who owns (the rights of) the artwork. If the artists start selling their work on marketplaces, they're forced to reveal the jpg.

The thing is that it is not very easy to sell your arts, so I wonder how those people managed to sell stealing art-works. Actually, there must be an interesting story behind this NFT, a famous author etc, so I don't really think that people who steal these pictures, earn anything.
I don't see any value in NFTs as art, but I do believe that they will be widely used in the future as proof of entitlement.

What's the point of having an NFT art when it is available for other to steal.it, download and make a copy of it. I thought it was to protect the artist from others to steal their work. How come the people who should be be trusted are the people doing the wrong here. There should be laws to protect them from company's who take advantage and at least give them the freedom to choose of what to do with their work.

Honestly I didn’t like the comments of others like “NFTs need to stop” or “NFTs are a bunch load of crap” despite that we all have our own opinions regarding this incident. However in NFTs, I am not a fan when it comes to just simply arts. Either I would collect NFTs that are collectibles with issue numbers, play to earn NFTs, virtual land ownership, etc.

I think for the arts side, even if they put a little watermark claiming that it’s theirs, it’s not enough. Just my opinion.

If they sell it in x chains, they can sell the original x times. What you describe is what they're capable of doing in one chain.

From a googling:

It doesn't look like a ponzi scheme to me, but rather a greater fool example, as said by the Pharmacist. There are no profits guaranteed from previous “investors”.

I couldn't care less about the centralized/decentralized aspect of NFTs, because I think that's a trivial matter in their case.  The most important point about NFTs is exactly what you described--they're worthless, just as all digital art will be judged to be if it can be reproduced by anyone such that the only thing distinguishing the NFT and the copy is the fact that the NFT is on a blockchain.

I also have to say, when a new concept like NFTs comes out and the entire space turns into a scammer's paradise, that's not a good sign.  Those hucksters on Youtube who are hyping these things like crazy are probably being paid to do it, because I don't see how anyone in their right mind would think there's anything worthwhile about owning some ugly pixelated mess for the long term.  The NFT market has turned into a perfect example of the greater fool theory in action, on the internet, for everyone to witness.

Mark my words, it'll last a year and then interest will die off instantly.  Just like ICOs and just like DeFi.

So, NFT won't solve the problem you have right now of somebody selling his pictures on multiple image stock sites, or dealing behind your back with 100 other customers. So, what exactly do they solve? 


After scratching my head for a while I will just say that this just won't happen, if the property would be treated like tokens the ownership would still be recorded by the government as everything does now, so destroying your token won't matter unless you renounce it on an official chain and basically donate it to the state. As for the last part, that's why I've been telling people that you will not have decentralized blockchains and tokens for everything in this world and they will never replace some things, it's just impossible.


All those so-called NTF games where the only thing you do is breed JPGs will turn into Ponzi schemes as you breed more JPGs and those will only be valuable if somebody ads more money to the scheme.
It's one of the basic laws of the economy, imagine you produce 1000 tons of fruit instead of 100 tons if nobody wants to buy the extra 900 what will happen to the price?  Now, if the demand was 2000 tons you will make x10 the profit, but once you go over that again some of them won't sell. And since some would be desperate to recoup the money "invested" they will sell the resort to dumping, making the prices go down and collapsing the scheme.
There is only one outcome to this, and it will happen sooner or later.

That is not really exclusive of the NFTs, although you can actually insert a contract limiting the amount of digital goods that can be inserted, so that would be advantageous for the investors. It also happens with card games such as Magic the Gathering. You have black moxes, double lands and the like selling for a fortune that only depends on the will of the Intellectual Property owner of not producing more at any time. How can you be sure that they would not eventually create, even if by mistake a card that is just too good and eats up the value of others?

You do not really trust them exactly... I mean yeah they can sell you "one of a kind" thing but then create 10k more of the same thing a day later, but you are holding the "original" in that case. If it is just one thing that they minted, and then they go ahead and water it down by minting more, you are not really earning anything else here because technically the imagine is the same image but at the same time the NFT is a different one so you are not getting screwed here. Of course, it is distasteful and of course you need to have some smart people to see the difference but you still hold a rare one in that case anyway.

We had cryptokitties the same way, it was said to be rare and only a few gen 0 will be available so everyone attacked and bought for high prices years ago, now we all know how many new  stuff they keep on printing and devaluing it. So, it is not that easy for sure.

When a trend in crypto is still fresh, early investors are the ones who.always benefits from it, the profits are always massive to the point of making news headlines, that's why we Saw a massive rally in meme and NFTs but unfortunately the hype is no longer their again. New project that are coming to uplift NFTS using Facebook influence metaverse are bow mostly stuck and can't really raise much fund to start their companies.
Personally, till date, I'm not convinced about the ides if digital, I may lack the total knowledge but I feel NFTs is not necessary elemental in this space to grow.

All the current implementations of NFT are completely centralized, so in such event the central authority could intervene and mint a new NFT. This just highlights how useless the NFT technology is - it changes absolutely nothing, because you still need the same third party intermediaries, but it created hype about owning digital items, and now there's a market bubble that will soon burst.

You supposedly trust the author/artist that they won't reproduce their work. Don't you do the same thing in real life? It's just that in real life they're much more discouraged to make many copies.  

This has been answered: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/111054

I have an other question:  What happens if in the far future, tangible items are sold as NFTs, but the owner decides to burn them? The market has to imply with the government's laws, 'cause I don't see the opposite happening; you can't just sell a house unofficially. Even if you do, what happens if the owner of the house loses the private key?

A thing that did not happen in this case as a platform didn't give an f word about and more importantly, this "feature" shows that you don't actually own an NFT you own a promise of somebody lending you a line of code.
If a platform can cancel your rights, how can you exclusively own an NFT, it's fairly obvious they own it not you, and besides, what will happen if the same NFT is minted on different chains? I'm so curious what will happen if somebody mints two identical NFT on different chains and two different poeple buy it, so they've bought the rights for, what? It's a situation where those things have a lower value as mass-produced collectible cards, at least those have different numbers, these can be printed indefinitely.


Sorry but in NFT games what else do you own apart from a pixelated ape which becomes useless when the hype of the game is over since no more suckers toss money at it and nobody can make money out of selling pixelated apes?

Correct me but there are 2 kinds of NFT at least for me. NFT arts and NFT games.
Like others here, I'm also not a fan of NFT art. A mere pixelated monkey that is worth millions of dollars? A JPEG art that is being sold for thousands of dollars? I mean I don't get the idea why people are spending too much money for these pixelated pictures that doesn't have any value at least from what I see.

I don't know if its me only but stealing arts of others and registering it as an NFT is one that I already see that will happen. I mean you will just steal a picture online, register it into the blockchain and boom!! you already have an NFT. Put it into the Opensea and sell it with the price you want. Where is the effort there? Effort in stealing I guess.

Its very unfortunate that Deviant Art has been a victim of art theft and I think it is the correct decision to shut down it however, generalizing NFT as a whole is I think wrong because NFT art is just one kind of NFT and there is these NFT games still. This thing that is happening right now might create a domino effect against those artists out there and they might even put their artworks into private to prevent being stolen by these shitty thieves. Still, can somebody explain why in the hell are the investors are investing into some JPEG monkeys or pixelated pictures that for me doesn't have any value at all?

I did read the article although I just skimmed the important parts so I don't recall that much. I think that it's covered, at that time I never thought of it but it could be covered possibly with copyrighht or something about the ownership of the artwork online, so in a way the artist can probably escalate it to a cease and desist or take the whole profit of the stolen work.

Before people disregard the existence of the NFT because of course why people buy just a simple art with tons of money and now currently just snipping their art you can now sell and steal others art I guess still it requires the creator signature in every art for its originally or there's an authentication platform to verify if the art is legit and really came from the author and bought in a legal process.

I don't understand why it seems NFT is now being equated with art or digital art. Of course, the history of NFT is a little bit older but when it became a thing lately, it was more associated with blockchain gaming which features NFTs. So, a criticism on NFTs venturing into art or digital art is not a criticism on NFT itself.

Anyway, I also am not a fan of NFT artworks. I think it is even a backward step in the realm of arts. It cheapens art. I could even probably say art became a thing even to the unskilled. There must be a set of criteria for someone to be called an artist. Moreover, it does not actually boost the sense of ownership when it comes to artworks. And it is also a big deal to me that uniqueness in artworks is greatly diminished because NFTs owned by different people are all unique but could also mean 2 or 3 or 5 or 10 or more of them could represent the same artwork.

By the way, I feel sorry for Deviant Art. NFT hosting sites should have at least provided a stringent mechanism on verifying originality or authenticity.

I was wary of NFTs in the first place because I think they're way overrated and a bit ridiculous, but I thought they were indeed a useful tool for creators to get support by making their own art into NFTs. Somehow, I didn't think about the possibility of others stealing creator's art and selling NFTs... It's a very good case against this whole technology because it shows that not only it fails to protect copyright, it actually helps make money on one's art in a completely new way, and even suggests that someone else owns something.

They do. If you steal someone's art work and make it into NFT and you get reported then the NFT you created will be nulled and will not be able to move. That is a thing in many blockchains and in many places, there are many methods of showing proof of ownership as well so you can't even steal in some of them as well because they will ask you to provide a proof that you own that art yourself.

There are some loopholes that some scammers will take advantage of and I am sure that eventually all of them will be covered, but we are living in a world where torrenting a movie is available and pirating never stopped no matter how harsh the penalty became. Which means that, yes there will be some ways to stop it, but in the long run scammers will keep on finding more methods to gain some profit from others art work and it will not be stopped fully.

Alright, so here's my question to you:  If we have an idea and this idea isn't properly implemented, should we abandon it? Or should we change our point of view against it?

It's pretty obvious that NFTs have failed on working exactly as envisioned, unless they weren't envisioned as I do in the first place. I don't know what those folks in the central of Ethereum™ were thinking of, but I'm personally in favor of transmitting rights without a notary. It's a cool idea, you know. To come into an agreement in a peer-to-peer way, without intermediaries.

Yeah, I'm against centralizing the way they're purchased, but hey, we even have decentralized exchanges. Transacting NFTs without a third party may not take long to come.

If the whole concept of NFT depends on centralized platforms, then it means that NFT is centralized and useless. You can do whatever you want with your token, but when a third party controls what that token represents, it's no different from any traditional centralized database. Except these third parties seem to be really lazy about what they are supposed to do.

If you visit the link and read the whole story you would understand why the artist had to shutdown his online art gallery. I just don't know yet if this whole stealing of online art is covered by law since the author or artist seems to lose his patient waiting for the admin to make a move to all of his report yet they don't seem to care at all.

If I am the artist I would do the same since you can't make money when all of your work is being stolen and yet they are the ones who benefited from it. It's frustrating if that happens to you.

That’s the problem, anyone can just copy and paste anything and sell it to investors on NFT platforms, while the main artist that created the work would stand gaining nothing at all, which is very bad. And there is nothing you can do about it, since the platforms wouldn’t agree to taking it down.

Some people have said that the only way that the artist can avoid this kind of thing from happen is by creating the art as an NFT themselves and putting them on NFT platforms, but how exactly would that solve the problem? And by the way not everyone is interested in cryptocurrency or NFT, so that’s not helping at all.

What would happen to the buyer of that NFT, and what could Miramax do to the buyer? Who is most probably be anonymous. I believe the market for that NFT will crash. No one would like to HODL a Tulip with a legal action waiting.Hahaha.

The first wave of NFT was pretty awesome and a lot of people have made a lot of money out of them but this current state of NFT is deplorable and it seems that they've totally deviated away from the point of having an NFT which is the community in it. This theft is just sad and at the same time makes me furious, I hate people who steal the works of other people and present it with the audacity that it's their own work, hopefully these theft is covered by laws.

The dilemma is that a lot of artists are not yet well-versed with NFT industry. I guess, most old artists or unknown artists don't know how to turn their artworks to NFTs. So it will take time for them to understand this new hype in the art industry. So if you are a buyer, you need to be vigilant with stolen works. Before you buy an expensive NFT item, make sure you are getting the authentic piece. Because once it is proven your possession is stolen or just imitation, your investment is gone.

Most of the art that are stolen in this way ...are people's creations or Art that existed before NFT's even existed. These artists might not even know about NFT's and by the time they do find out... it might be too late.

Yes... struggling artists with a little knowledge about NFT's are cashing in now.. because it has given them a voice now. It is not just the gallery owners that are making money now.. 

This is good news, I personally also highlight this. NFT is not only a good opportunity for artists but also a good opportunity for fraudsters, some reports that I have heard are not a few NFT artists their work is stolen and sold by fraudsters and plagiarists in the NFT market. imo that's a good decision the artist made by closing the gallery so that intellectual theft of his work doesn't happen again.

NFT world does have a "stolen art" branch where you could notify and get your art back to you and that NFT gets nullified, whoever ends up paying for it will be screwed in that sense but that doesn't mean that we will have to let it be, anyone who buys any NFT needs to do their research before they get into it.

Anything online could become NFT and we would have to be checking each and every one of them, there is no scenario where we can't wait a minute and see if it is real or not, we could always end up with checking and if you are rushing to get it as soon as it is available and end up buying a stolen work that gets nullified even though you paid for it, the buyer will be the one who gets screwed and seller will not get the amount reverted back if he managed to withdraw it already, and artist will be able to get his art back, so this is all already in place.

Talking about the theft of works of art, which is now quite common. Where there are a lot of silly pictures as NFT which is a pretty big price. I don't know what collectors are chasing with rock pictures, cartoons etc. In fact, if you think about it with a large amount to buy the image, it's better to buy it for a clearer asset like Bitcoin. This is just ridiculous being exaggerated by a community that charges exorbitant prices.

Shusssh you all crazy Bitcoiners....Shusssh!!

Let me just first sell-off some of my "art" in the form of NFTs and auction it off to the biggest fool...Stop exposing the plan to everybody..

LOL. I totally agree that this NFT business enables complete nut-cases. The pump and dump here is way more easier than even the ICOs. You just launch your project, do a fake whitelist, then do a public mint. And on the day of mint, buy some of your own JPEG's on Opensea from some other accounts. The people who haven't gotten into the "whitelist" start FOMOing and then you take the money on re-sales, on re-selling from your Alt-accounts and your brothers accounts.

It totally works.

Despite this, Just like alt-chains, it is a lot about community than just these pump and dumps. There are indeed some NFT projects where people are putting in money and ETH, simply because they believe in the concept or want to be part of the community. Like checkout this group called as @nounsdao. They sell 1 NFT for upwards of a 100 ETH every day. and they are still going strong and using that treasury to fund more projects and artists.

So frankly, its not all bad. There is of course a lot of scammy shit but its up to the individual to discern.

They are different, because all those collectibles are what they are, but NFTs are supposed to only represent a right to something, but the problem is, there's absolutely no way to enforce that right without centralization. NFT pictures are hosted on centralized websites, in-game items with NFTs are stored in game server databases, and so on.

NFT is hyped as "truly owning digital assets" and being decentralized because of blockchain, but the reality is that they are all so heavily centralized that it makes them pointless.

And that's probably why the entire thing turned into a big joke. NFT's were something that was supposed to let artists have ownership over their artworks, but in the end, it still allows for plagiarism to be a thing, and as you said, others could still add a small change towards artworks and call it their own. If that's allowed and considered as 'original artwork', then wouldn't the value of the original artists' work drop? Honestly, the NFT market is just being run by hype right now imo.

This is apparently occurring, at the highest levels.


Even Quentin Tarantino is selling NFTs containing content he doesn't have the rights to.

I still think NFTs aren't so different from collectibles, art, memorabilia, antique markets. The only difference is, there is a lot of silicon valley dot com hype behind NFTs wheras other collectibles and art have long since hit a saturation point.

I completely agree with you. The point of NFTs was to enable artists to sell their valuable art in a digitized format.
NFT was meant to be used as a token through which users can prove the ownership of an asset.
While all these goals are still being achieved the use of NFT has completely driven people to a money making long term scam.
Why I say it as a scam is because there's no point of holding these arts which has no meaning.
Literally hundreds of NFT projects keep launching everyday (all blockchains combines) and its just like the ICO hype according to me.
Many projects keep launching and will settle for dust in a year or two.
I might be going a little off topic but the point is that people are using NFT wrongly and they are just gonna lose money in the long term.

For this I totally agree, in fact it started since the first time NFT was launched. Thieves are targeting artists who are not aware that NFT has been duplicating works without the knowledge of the creators. This is an act that violates the prerogative of the individual, which means that every work owned has value and value. Without any respect, steal and publish on the website and then exchange it for large sums without any incentive to the artist. The multi-layered offense of stealing and misusing works of art. sometimes the abused nature of decentralization makes this a loophole.

Reproduction of any artwork is quite possible, there are people who can very easily just add a layer and copy the whole thing and sell it like it's theirs. I do think this very post proves us the essential requirement of having your own NFT for your artwork. See the thing is, these things have been happening since time immemorial, people take advantage and you can't decide who is the owner, at last we have a tool that can help us label the owner and give him his rights, he would own his own art. Making an NFT is easy as well, now few sites are offering the gas fee being paid after the seller buys it therefore with minimal technical knowledge you can actually get your own NFT in the market and get recognition.

I agree with you, NFT use cases have been overstretched. There is a very clear use case for NFT in digital assets that confer some abilities or benefits to holders. The clearest example could be in-game items. You can proof ownership, transfer trustlessly and apply the effects of the item in the game or games. Companies of the sector are already in the know, although some reticence may appear, as they will cut themselves from the middle-man profit.

NFT that confer ownership of a work of art kept on a vault are also all right, but on the end fractional or full ownership can be attained easily by the pre-existing legal instruments so the NFT offer just some transferability advantage and perhaps a legal caveat.

In so far as NFTs that do not confer ownership, they are, IMHO pointless.


There is something amazing that cannot be put into words about the original physical paintings. You have to feel it when you have the chance to be in front. That is probably why they become famous in the first place. My take is that a replica will loose a bit of the effect even if perfectly executed. I do not thing that can be said of the digital ones.

No, poeple are stealing his art which he was just exposing and selling all those thumbnails for money.
He is not selling 100pixel jpgs and Deviantart is not about making money something poeple here have become obsessed with.


And this whole episode proves how stupid the whole thing is because poeple are easily bypassing something that was supported to solve the copyright problem. In the end, nothing good came out of it, fake auction, stolen artworks, no way to actually protect your property nothing, just hype of somebody trading jpg pics and codes thinking it will get rich.

The fact that hundreds of art pieces that have entered the NFT world, since this is not a single case are simply stolen pictures of which not even the seller has rights to it shows what a fake industry this is.


Yeah, lol, suddenly everyone is starting to realize that NFT ae going to be plagued by the same problem they were supposed to fix.

i fear that many other talented artist around the world are victims of this as well, that is their art being stolen and used by others who have more opportunities and a means to sell them. I wonder if copyright laws are significant in the regards of NFT's, but i think an artist who has proper documents backing his "intellectual property" can sue someone who has not just stolen his work, but commercialised it as well.

I can't really understand why he would have to shut down his online gallery if people were stealing his art and turning them to NFTs? I am hard-pressed to think that people who would buy his art are instead buying NFTs? I sincerely doubt that is the case. I mean, I don't need NFT's to download someone's art and sell it as my own, but that wouldn't force the artist to shut down their business. That seems like half-told info or just false. I have no affiliation with NFTs and as an artist, I strongly disagree with the notion of art ownership and originality, but I wouldn't throw NFT's under the bus just because someone supposedly closed their business because of theft?

This is not a solution at all, it doesn't prevent thieves from making an NFT. They can do it and try to impersonate the original artist, they can pretend to be a different artist and pretend that it was their original work. They can even flip some pixels to fool the reverse image search algorithms. They can scan a physical artwork of some obscure artist and pretend that it's the original work. There's lots of ways to create fake digital art and get away with it if the buyer doesn't put enough effort into verifying it.



"Bitcoin is used by criminals" is a bad argument because a relatively small share of transactions belongs to criminals, and Bitcoin is not exactly a big crime enabler, because there are better tools, like privacycoins or cash. Though Bitcoin certaintly did contribute to the rise of ransomware, and it's still the most popular payment method for it. But overall Bitcoin is a net positive because its other properties offset the negatives.

I will argue that NFT is a net negative, because it's so full of scammers who pump their NFTs with fake trades and lure suckers into buying something that is insanely overpriced, it creates other negative situations like the one that I posted, and it has very little positive effects, because the technology itself solves absolutely nothing from technical point of view.

Small artists actually tend to lose money, as minting an NFT is very costly because of ETH gas fees, and they have low chance of making profit. NFT doesn't change the fact that few people are ready to pay for art that they can consume for free - buying prints, vinyl records, etc. Those who want to do it already do it just fine with traditional payment channels.


Bitcoin gains are a multiplier on the money that you have invested. So two people who invested different amounts in the same time have gotten the same ROI, which is fair. And they had pretty much the same opportunity for investment, as there is no barriers to enter Bitcoin market.

But with NFT small artists get nothing while celebrities instantly make millions. I'm not saying that inequality is evil and we should fight it, but this is a counter to the popular argument that NFT helps the artists. It does not, it generally only benefits those who don't need the help.

It’s really blockchain spam, but shitcoin blockchains can do what they want, and lose the war of “sustained friction”. If you know, you know.


They’re merely Tulips, anyone can right-click/save any digital image/NFT, convert them into a NFT of your own, sell in your marketpace.

Look, I'm not even going to defend NFTs because I totally get the criticisms, but if we're going to use this argument to conclude that NFTs are bad just because some art are getting stolen while ignoring the fact that some digital artists are making money in a difficult-to-gain-recognition industry, then we're just going back to the foolish "bitcoin is only being used by criminals" argument. Let's not use the arguments we hate.

People who made huge amounts of money on bitcoin are the ones that were also already rich. Doesn't make it a bad thing.

This might be the downfall of NFTs for the arts. But because of how easy it is to mint the art into the blockchain and make it as an NFT, these cons and thieves have found it easy to publish it and call it as an NFT. Too bad that the legit artists have to suffer because of these thieves that are taking advantage of their skills. It became pointless when somebody who just saw the art and haven't seen that it's not yet published as an NFT, whoever goes first becomes the owner of it.

The NFT is supposed to "prove" that the NFT owner is the one and only true owner of the piece of art.
He could prove his claims in court and he could demand for compensation when other people are using that piece of art without his permission.
However,without a good system to track and punish all the art stealers,the NFT system/marketplace is basically pointless.
Every NFT owner must have good lawyers in hand and he must be willing to go to court and sue all the stealers,who are copying and stealing his NFTs.
This costs a lot of time,efforts and money.That's why a lot of NFT owners won't bother to do anything against the people,who are copying the artwork from their NFTs.

I don't know.Perhaps buying an NFT is the digital equivalent of buying the real Mona Lisa,rather than buying a photo of Mona Lisa,which can be multiplied by 1 million copies and shared for free on the internet.
It's pretty difficult to measure the monetary value of art.

like GIOCONDA, anyone can create a new paint, even better with shocking-red lips.
but anyone should be interested in original version (created by the first author) not in other copies/reproductions etc.
maybe some copies will be interesting but the first one created by the author should be the point of reference.

it should be clear that anyone can create a NFT with anything he want.
did you will buy a NFT crated by a random artist / copy-paster or the original one created by first author?
If people doesn't understand the difference between original and copies ... it's just a time waste.

there is a solution very easy. to avoid art to be stolen in that way, the author should create his own NFT and not wait other people to stole a work.

Today I found an interesting post on /r/Cryptocurrency about an artist who had to shut down his online gallery, because people keep stealing his works and turning them into NFTs - here's the original post.

NFT technology is legitimately useless, all it does is creating a unique token on blockchain that has zero meaningful connection with the thing it's supposed to represent. When you NFT is an url that points to a centralized site, it's really no different than buying a star or moon land from some scam company.

The artist said that NFT hosting sites refused to cooperate and remove the stolen art, but even if they were doing their job, it would still mean that the whole system is centralized and pointless. Deluded NFT fans like to say that NFT gives people the ability to "truly" own something, but in reality NFT owners own absolutely nothing and are at mercy of NFT hosting sites.

NFTs were said to help support the artists, but here we see how they did the opposite and forced an artist to close their gallery and reducing their chances of selling their art or getting commissions. The artists who are profiting from NFTs the most are the big names like Grimes who are already rich.