Artistic licence: Can you pirate an NFT?

It’s the craze that’s taking the internet by storm, but questions are being raised over the rights assigned to digital art

Have you ever wished that you could own a picture of a gorilla wearing sunglasses? What about a slightly different coloured gorilla wearing sunglasses? If so, NFTs could be the new phenomenon for you.

NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, are the hot new investment asset in the online world. Built on similar technology to cryptocurrency, the idea is that you can take a digital asset – be it a tweet, an image or something else – and tag yourself as the owner on an indelible blockchain. And people are paying big money for the privilege. One artwork by an artist known as “Beeple” has gone for as much as $69.3 million.

However, you won’t fall off your seat when you read that not everyone thinks that NFTs are a particularly wise investment. Which is why Australian digital artist Geoff Huntley has created a protest, of sorts, in the form of TheNFTBay. Modelled on notorious pirate website The Pirate Bay, he has created a single 17GB torrent file containing every NFT image ever created, to satirise the fact that “pirating” an NFT is usually as simple as a right-click and ‘save as’.

On the GitHub page for the project, Huntley writes that he hopes his project will show people that “purchasing NFT art right now is nothing more than directions on how to access or download [an] image.

“There is a gap of understanding between buyer and seller right now that is being used to exploit people,” he added. “The image is typically not stored on the blockchain, and the majority of images I’ve seen are hosted on web2.0 storage, which is likely to end up as 404, meaning the NFT has even less value.”

His torrent of NFT data is freely available for download at thenftbay.org.

So the obvious question to ask is: is it actually possible to pirate an NFT?

“The NFT in itself may not necessarily have intellectual property rights, it really depends on the intellectual property rights in the underlying asset,” said

Sally Mewies, partner and head of technology and digital at law firm Walker Morris. “If it’s a painting, for example, then depending on who’s done the painting, [and] what rights have been granted to the person who creates the NFT from the painting… that could be an infringement in terms of copying.”

But fundamentally, Mewies concluded, “it isn’t clear in [intellectual property] law that ‘minting’ a digital asset infringes some rights, because no-one had ever heard of ‘minting’ until about a year ago. I think we’ll see either some cases or some regulation around it at some point.”

For now, it might be a better idea to spend your money on a far more rewarding PC Pro subscription instead.