Digital artists & photographers
With the recent explosion of the NFT market from 2019 until now, we’ve witnessed how artists intrinsically value ownership, especially when there is additional future benefit to monetize, license, or re-sell their art.
Many artists prefer to be known via a pseudonym to protect their artistic integrity and may continue to seek a solution that allows them to control where their art ends up whether they are selling the content outright, or simply sharing.
Ownership and rights management are core primitives of the Web3 ecosystem. The concept of tokenized ownership can be applied to digital assets like digital art, photos, music, videos, and even real world assets to offer greater opportunities for content monetization such as licensing, revenue sharing, subscriptions, and upfront payments without detaching the art from the original creator. In traditional creator markets, creators are often at the mercy of a middle-man to find a buyer for their art, price it appropriately, and ensure distribution. With the rise of Web3, that power is entirely in the creator’s hands. NFT-driven marketplaces and platforms like OpenSea, Rarible, Audius, SuperRare, and Mirror have become dominant players in the space, with new incumbents like Mintstars, Passes, and Sunroom emerging to monetize curator content via NFT subscriptions. So far, it appears most tokenized content platforms are applied to public content, it’s likely we’ll see a rise in token-gated or private membership access, essentially giving the creator a new way to manage digital rights.
As generative AI continues to develop, many questions around IP rights, attribution, monetization, and the ethics of training models on existing artists' work remain open.
Supporting Articles:
IP, Digital Identity, and Branding in the Metaverse and Web3 - Part I: Digital Identity & The Creator Economy, Bereskin & Parr LLP, November 2022.
Blockchain and IP Law: A Match made in Crypto Heaven?, WIPO, Brigit Clark, February 2018.
"Can blockchain solve the ownership debacle over AI generated art?", Cointelegraph, Svannah Fortis, December 2022.
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