NFT and art theft

[ven7net]

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.

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.

[hatshepsut93]

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.

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.

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.

Yes, it's very useful. For scammers.

[Zilon]

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.

[jostorres]

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.

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.

[hatshepsut93]

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.

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.

[Leviathan.007]

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.

[Tumanggor]

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.

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

[Fortify]

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.

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.

[EdenHazard]

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.

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.

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

[Lizzylove1]

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.

[OgNasty]

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)

[dunfida]

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.

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.

[wxa7115]

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.

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.