Theory and practice of intellectual property
№ 2 / 2022
ISSN (Print) 2308-0361
ISSN (Online) 2519-2744
PDF (Ukrainian)DOI: https://doi.org/10.33731/22022.259748
Published 2022-06-23
NFT — the latest digital copyright object or form of expression
Leonid Tarasenko
Ukraine
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4359-8965
Abstract
The article is dedicated to current issues of NFT legal protection. There were analysed the legal nature of NFT as an object of copyright, the legal regime of NFT — the work, and some proposals for improving the legal regulation of these relations are substantiated. It has been proven that in a separate group of copyright objects it is expedient to allocate new digital objects that appear recently — NFT, multimedia works, video games (computer games), Internet site, blockchain, and others. The legal nature of new digital copyright objects has been found to be controversial. It is established that in the scientific literature NFT is interpreted as an independent object of copyright, as a way to use the object of copyright (for example, conversion of art into a digital token form), as an objective form of expression (digital token form), as security digital document, as a way of technical protection of the copyright object from encroachment on it. It has been proven that converting a work into an NFT form is a way to commercialize a copyright object. Furthermore, it is substantiated that NFT is a form of expression (existence) of the object of copyright, and NFT-work (photography, video, painting, drawing, music etc.) in the presence of originality (creative nature) is the object of copyright, which is fixed in specific digital tokenized form.
It has been established that tokenization of works provides additional opportunities for copyright protection of such objects due to blockchain — the technology on which NFT operates.
It has been proven that NFT as a digital certificate certifies the uniqueness of the work, which allows increasing its value and avoid illegal distribution in the digital environment in the future (which is typical of almost all digital and digitized copyright objects). Likewise, it has been proven that most NFT disputes should be resolved based on the findings of judicial intellectual property and computer science expertise.
It has been established that copyright law is not adapted to regulate the use of works in the digital environment, so NFT works have an undefined legal regime as objects of copyright. It has been proven that the current copyright law, which is imperfect in regulating relations in the digital environment in general, should be applied to the relations related to the creation, use, exercise, and protection of NFT works.
Keywords: NFT, copyright, work, token, blockchain, digital environment, judicial expertise
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