NFT Art Sales Are Booming. Just Without Some Artists Permission.

NFT art sales are booming. Just without some artists' permission.
NFTs were hyped as a way to make sure artists get paid for their work. Now, many creators are struggling to stop a wave of piracy.
Visitors in front of an immersive art installation by Refik Anadol, which was converted into NFT and auctioned online at Sotheby's, at the Digital Art Fair in Hong Kong on Sept. 30, NFT 2021. Tyrone Siu / Reuters file.
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Jan. 10, 2022, 8:53 PM UTC.
Digital thieves had stolen from Aja Trier before.
Trier, a painter in San Antonio, often riffs on Vincent van Gogh’s "Starry Night," adding dogs or dinosaurs to it, or reimagining it as a desert landscape or Mordor from "Lord of the Rings." She sells versions on mugs and mouse pads and pillows, and over the years she’s caught and stopped people selling pirated versions of her work on Amazon and other online marketplaces.
But thanks to the explosion of the NFT art market, thieves have started stealing her work at a jaw-dropping rate. Last week, an unidentified user on OpenSea, the dominant marketplace for the burgeoning NFT art market, started putting tens of thousands of listings of her work, often duplicates, up for sale. Thirty-seven of them sold before she was able to convince the platform to take them down.
"They just kept taking and remaking them as NFTs," Trier said. "It’s so flagrant. And if it happens to me, it can happen to anyone."
Trier’s story has already become common in the burgeoning world of NFT art sales. RJ Palmer, a San Francisco artist who designs creatures and monsters both as commissioned digital works and for movies and video game companies, said issuing takedown requests to NFT platforms for his work became a daily routine before he eventually gave 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."
As the NFT art market takes off, systems to ensure a buyer is making a legitimate purchase of digital ownership have failed to keep up. Anonymous thieves now regularly steal whatever digital art they can find online and pass it off as their own to sell. While NFT proponents tout the technology as a way to revolutionize arts patronage, the rapidly growing digital marketplaces that enable those sales have so far done little to stop that piracy.
Aja Trier’s artwork for sale by an art thief. OpenSea has since taken down the listing. Aja Trier.
NFTs, short for NFT nonfungible tokens, have exploded as a new kind of art market in the past two years, promising a way for If you loved this post and you wish to receive more details concerning crypto wallet may make money generously visit our own web-site. people to prove they own a digital asset. Rooted in the same blockchain technology as cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and cryptocurrency Ethereum, NFTs have been called everything from "a geeky implementation of bragging rights" to digital certificates of authenticity.
Actors, musicians, athletes and even political campaigns have jumped into the space, issuing all manner of NFT-connected digital knickknacks. NFT trading volume grew rapidly, hitting $10.7 billion in the third quarter of 2021, according to analytics platform DappRadar.
In the art world, NFTs were quickly hyped as solving a variety of problems. They offered a way for artists to monetize digital art, ensure they could sell their work and even make money if their art were sold in the future. NFTs are not art themselves but rather digital deeds, certificates that can be associated with a piece of art and then bought and sold as representative of ownership.