What Exactly Do You Get When You Buy an NFT? Three Lawyers Discuss - Ep.224

Olta Andoni, fintech and IP Attorney at Zlatkin Wong and adjunct professor at Chicago Kent College of Law, Tonya Evans, visiting Full Professor of Law at Penn State Dickinson Law School and host of the podcast Tech Intersect, and Stuart Levi, co-head of the Intellectual Property and Technology practice at Skadden Arps and coordinator of the firm's Blockchain and Digital Asset practice, break down the legal issues surrounding NFTs. In this episode, they discuss:
how the law looks at non-fungible tokens (1:25) why owning an NFT is different from owning the rights to the underlying asset making up the NFT (3:12) problems that blockchain solves for creators  (5:09) how corporations (aka content intermediaries) are handling NFTs (6:53) what rights the purchase of an NFT gives a buyer (11:51) derivative artwork, the fair use copyright law, moral rights, and how U.S. law views NFTs (15:53) how to determine the jurisdiction of an NFT (25:00) what type of legal recourse is available to artists whose art has been stolen and redistributed as an NFT (32:37) the differences in the terms of services between NFT marketplaces  (36:26) why the first sale doctrine may not apply to digital assets (43:16) what a buyer is getting when purchasing a blockchain license (46:12) how NFT creators should protect their work (51:43) whether a fractionalized NFT is a security (55:25) how NFTs will change the business of content creation (58:44)
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Episode Links

People
Tonya Evans
Twitter: https://twitter.com/IPProfEvans Penn State Dickinson Law: https://dickinsonlaw.psu.edu/tonya-m-evans  Relevant content: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-intersect-59-ping-prof-2-non-fungible-tokens-nfts/id1493143898?i=1000512485580 https://clarivate.com/darts-ip/blog/copyright-blockchain/  https://clarivate.com/darts-ip/blog/intro-to-ip-and-blockchain/  Olta Andoni
Twitter: https://twitter.com/AndoniOlta?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor Zlatkin Wong: https://zlatkinwong.com/en/  Relevant content: https://www.coindesk.com/stop-tokenizing-art-you-dont-own  Stuart Levi
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stuartlevi/ Skadden: https://www.skadden.com/  Relevant content:  https://www.mondaq.com/unitedstates/fin-tech/799182/emerging-discovery-issues-in-blockchain-litigation
Legal Links
Fair Use Doctrine: https://pitt.libguides.com/copyright/fairuse#:~:text=The%20doctrine%20of%20Fair%20Use,teaching%2C%20scholarship%2C%20and%20research. First Sale Doctrine: https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual-1854-copyright-infringement-first-sale-doctrine#:~:text=The%20first%20sale%20doctrine%2C%20codified,interests%20of%20the%20copyright%20owner Moral Rights: https://www.copyright.gov/policy/moralrights/ Digital Millennium Copyright Act https://www.copyright.gov/legislation/dmca.pdf  Visual Artists Rights Act http://www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/martin/art_law/esworthy.htm
Miscellaneous Links
Banksy https://www.cbsnews.com/news/banksy-nft-injective-destroy-art-digital-token/ Fractionalized NFTs https://markets.businessinsider.com/currencies/news/sec-crypto-mom-hester-peirce-selling-nft-fragments-illegal-2021-3-1030250153 Dapper Labs License https://medium.com/dapperlabs/nft-license-2-0-why-a-nft-can-do-what-mickey-mouse-never-could-27673d5f29aa  TechnoLlama Blog https://www.technollama.co.uk/can-copyright-teach-us-anything-about-nfts