NFT Theft is more rampant than you might think
Like any novel technology, NFTs do face teething trouble.
Lack of Copyright Law and Certification Systems act as a Breeding Ground for NFT Theft.
NFT drew attention as a new business idea for investment across games, art and culture. The size of the market for NFTs has grown significantly over the past few years.With celebrities such as Beeple, Grimes and Nike and large-scale investment in NFT business, not only those who knew only NFT technology, but also general consumers are increasing significantly.
NFT (Non-Fungible Token) is widely attracting attention as a technology that can secure, contain, and protect the ownership and scarcity of digital content that was able to be copied indiscriminately with blockchain.
NFT is a sort of ‘digital certificate’. The information of digital creations exists in the form of being stored in the blockchain technology.
Due to the nature of the blockchain, data recorded with NFT cannot be altered or deleted, and NFT is designed so that there cannot be more than one digital token of equal value. With the advent of NFTs, digital records that were not recognized as valuable as in-kind began to be re-examined.
NFT is not only allowed for digital art, which is mostly treated as a work of art, but also from drawings to text and video etc.The first tweet from Twitter founder (Jack Dorsey), sold at a high price, is a good example.Even now, it is a record that is open to anyone and anyone can access it, but only one NFT linked to it was recognized as a digital asset with a value of about 3 billion won based on its symbolism and rarity.
However, the biggest problem is that NFT, a blockchain-based digital certificate, can be issued by anyone without restrictions. All you need is the content you want to issue with NFT, and a platform wallet for NFT issuance and storage. In other words, you can issue and sell someone’s NFT copy.
Recent months have seen NFT artworks sell for ever higher prices while disrupting the traditional art market. If you have recently been on twitter, you might have also seen internet trolls right-clicking and saving these NFTs, while verbally ridiculing the owners of these — in their opinion over-priced — art pieces. While this is annoying, it does only become a problem when these right-clickers go as far as creating a new NFT in its image (or in layman terms: theft). They claim to be its original creator, reselling stolen NFTs online, sometimes even NFTs of artworks that have never before been sold as NFT. This happens without the original owner’s consent nor his or her knowledge, and the thieves usually face no punishment; this comes down to a lack of applicable Copyright Law in the scene.
While this is already bad enough, you as a customer might also encounter this problem when buying NFTs on the market’s biggest platforms like OpenSea. You might not recognize that the NFT you’ve just purchased is indeed stolen. Your new NFT might even include an empty link in its metadata. Now in the worst case you could get sued. In the best case, Copyright Law does not apply but you still end up with a worthless product and less money in your wallet.
NFT is a decentralized technology, based on the blockchain, which comes with many perks and advantages. However, it also results in a reluctance of platforms like OpenSea to react to reports of theft and hacking. Do not be mistaken, these platforms have monitors in place to algorithmically scan newly submitted NFTs, but many stolen ones still slip through. What can be done? More centralization would take away NFT’s biggest advantage while also resulting in a heavy backlash from its large user base, whereas hoping that Copyright Law could be the savior is — for now — a lost hope. Copyright Law has traditionally been slow to adapt to new media and technologies, and a lack of enforcement would greatly hinder its effectiveness.
In the end, young startup companies have already started to develop novel certification systems that might just be the answer to this dilemma. Until then, sit tight and let the twitter mud fight continue just a little longer.
About CenterPrime
The CenterPrime project uses a hyperledger private chain to share an open banking API to apps, connecting centralized finance to decentralized finance. Also making smart pairing data for loan, remittance, exchange, payment, and exchange rate information possible to be included in fintech oracle networks.
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