NFTs and copyright infringement

You might find someone else has created an NFT from your photo and has printed a hundred of them. Publication of an image online without authorization will most likely be considered infringement. This is because it constitutes the making available to public, which is an exclusive right held by the copyright holder for every country that has signed the Berne Convention. If this is the case, however, it is certainly infringement, as it means that all thousand instances of the image are now recorded on the blockchain and thus made available to the public. It isn’t the image being purchased with NFT, but something similar to a certificate proving authenticity. This makes it a valuable collectible. It will be nearly impossible to remove the image because information is shared peer-to-peer. Similar to torrents, thousands may have a file that they want to exchange. Hard forks are a drastic change in the protocol of a Blockchain network, which can invalidate previously-valid blocks/transactions (or vice versa). These forks are usually used to fix security issues or reverse hacks. An attempt to correct an infringing instance would be disruptive or damaging to others. This is because it’s not something that can happen casually. There is only one instance of infringing if the image protected isn’t included in the NFT or hosted on any server. It will be interesting to observe how judges balance the protection of copyright holders with preservation of modern technology such as blockchain. \[…]