Unfortunately there's nothing to stop unscrupulous chancers from selling anyone's work as a NFT, even those that have already been sold as one before. All you're buying with an image NFT is a location on the block chain saying this bit with this image attached belongs to you. Buying an NFT confers no image rights to the buyer, either copyright or the right to distribute it further or any kind of licensing at all.

I imagine none of the agencies have specific legalese in place to try to prevent image licensees minting their download as a NFT yet, but I'm sure it'll be coming soon. Not that that will stop them of course...

So at the moment I can't say to someone with a standard RF license that they aren't allowed to sell an NFT of my work?

Of course you can.  An NFT implies that someone �owns� a digital photo, file or whatever and is transferring ownership to someone else.  These people don�t �own� the work.  You do.  A license doesn�t change that.

NFTs can be offered without any ownership implied or required. That's why it's such a useless fad.

The record of the transaction is "secure", but that's it. I could sell as many NFTs of the Brooklyn Bridge as there would be gullible buyers to take me up on the offer.

And if there were detailed promises or terms with a deal, who would enforce that if the seller later reneged?

Anyone who uses one of your images without a license (directly) from you or an agency representing you needs to get a license. Your costs to go after them may be more than you want to pay.

...It's pretty straight forward if they don't have a license at all (I think? doesn't an NFT "point" people a version of the image which a seller would have no right to display without some kind of license?). It would also be good if I could tell the ones who do have a license to quit it by pointing to a clause in the license forbidding it.

None of the agencies specifically forbid offering a licensed work as part of an NFT, but you see language like (from Adobe's license page) a standard license forbidding:  "Create merchandise, templates, or other products for resale or distribution where the primary value of the product is associated with the asset itself."  I can't imagine anyone paying for an extended license to sell an NFT - but that would be analogous to selling prints with an extended license, which is allowed.

If the NFT was offering a web page with a mix of content - like syndicated articles with an embedded licensed image - I'd think that would meet the license terms. The value would be in the whole collection of content, not just the image.

Have you been able to find any specific language for an NFT offer from any of the charlatans who have contacted you? That might help to pin down if they've violated any license terms.

Edited to add links to a couple of articles explaining just how little "there" there is in NFTs. You own the record, but that's about it.

https://www.theverge.com/22310188/nft-explainer-what-is-blockchain-crypto-art-faq

https://www.protocol.com/newsletters/protocol-fintech/nft-ip-rights?rebelltitem=1#rebelltitem1

From the above, this quote:

"The NFT rights question comes amid a swirling debate over compensating creators.... It�s a debate about whether creators should retain rights forever, or whether NFT owners should reap the rewards of participating in and promoting those NFTs for the creators. With NFTs seeping into more of the broader creator world, expect to see these issues heat up."

The article below mentions one instance of a DMCA take down notice being sent to a would-be NFT seller who had ripped off the original owner of a work. But as you'll see, this is a really messy area

https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/what-are-copyright-implications-nfts-2021-10-29/

Quote from: Justanotherphotographer on January 13, 2022, 11:23

...It's pretty straight forward if they don't have a license at all (I think? doesn't an NFT "point" people a version of the image which a seller would have no right to display without some kind of license?). It would also be good if I could tell the ones who do have a license to quit it by pointing to a clause in the license forbidding it.

None of the agencies specifically forbid offering a licensed work as part of an NFT, but you see language like (from Adobe's license page) a standard license forbidding:  "Create merchandise, templates, or other products for resale or distribution where the primary value of the product is associated with the asset itself."  I can't imagine anyone paying for an extended license to sell an NFT - but that would be analogous to selling prints with an extended license, which is allowed.

If the NFT was offering a web page with a mix of content - like syndicated articles with an embedded licensed image - I'd think that would meet the license terms. The value would be in the whole collection of content, not just the image.

Have you been able to find any specific language for an NFT offer from any of the charlatans who have contacted you? That might help to pin down if they've violated any license terms.

Thanks Jo Ann, I think that an NFT would definitely fall into "primary value of the product is associated with the asset itself."

I'm sure all the agencies are figuring out ways to sell our work as NFTs with the minimum possible royalty to the artist.

..

Hello,
Can we sell as NFTs our stock images that have been sold already many times on stocks sites?
Isn't the idea that when someone buys a NFT that the image is exclusive and never used before?
Thanks!

Yes, you can sell any image as an NFT. If you wanted you could try to improve the offer by promising all kinds of bonus sweeteners like saying it hadn�t been sold before, but it�s not necessary. There are no rules where NFTs are concerned.

That is interesting. Seems to make the whole image buying thing even more inexplicably stupid.

Still, if people want to buy them, we should be there. Caveat emptor and all that.

This is an interesting read about NFTs (and also about blockchain, the nature of platforms and the difficulties of change in decentralized systems). Search for NFT if you want to skip to that part. It's worth emphasizing a point at the end about how the intermediaries - in this case OpenSea - are gatekeepers to access your secure-in-the-blockchain item.

"All this means that if your NFT is removed from OpenSea, it also disappears from your wallet. It doesn�t functionally matter that my NFT is indelibly on the blockchain somewhere, because the wallet (and increasingly everything else in the ecosystem) is just using the OpenSea API to display NFTs"

https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html

That's what I thought. The image isn't actually "in" the NFT. It's basically like a receipt for a link saying the person who owns the NFT owns whatever is at the end of the link.

I've spent the day uploading a few images to opensea to see what I could see. I'll report back if there's any interest. I imagine without some kind of well targeted social media campaign there's little point, but you never know.

https://opensea.io/fotoVoyager?tab=created_collections