https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/Z5VDwSRAyao8ftUR0HQeG0ctUqLOBjuBTWmjLhRP30tBQtW8AFBslxewoTjvt4Syq-Me_CUTwoZIM9I-y1zFgEatA-qsN-Am1fgnpQj_mqiJ3WhPSymH-UUKYsI2HpJ3bPfePNd_iSJtHWdquw

Ownership of NFT is not equivalent to ownership of copyright! The copyright exists separately from the ownership of the material object or NFT. The author does not lose the copyright of his work after it is sold (unless separately agreed and stated in writing when transferring/purchasing the NFT). The collector only has the right to own the work itself, all other copyrights remain with the author.

Legal status of NFT-tokens

In terms of legal nature, NFT-tokens are comparable to the category of digital rights. But the expert community discusses the approach that digital rights differ from other rights only in the way they are fixed. Sharing this approach, we can say that the categories of "digital rights" and "copyrights" are not comparable, while the issue and transfer of NFTs provide only a technical fixation of the right transfer.

How do I prove ownership of a purchased NFT work?

When a digital artist sells his work using NFT technology, the buyer gets his hands on the fact of owning a work of art. This fact is anchored in the blockchain network. This means that the authenticity of the purchased work is easy to verify and impossible to counterfeit: not the original high resolution painting, but the digital signature attached to the work. The choice of what, in addition to the digital signature, the collector receives is left to him and the artist himself. It is not uncommon for artists to additionally send physical copies (or originals) of their work to collectors. Information about the owner of an NFT work is openly stored on blockchain platforms, and the buyer can prove rights to such a work by showing his electronic wallet, synchronized with the selected blockchain platform, into which the NFT token will fall as a result of the transaction. However, the buyer of the token acquires only a digital property right to it, receives the right to own a registry entry in a distributed (decentralized) registry.  As for copyright, only the rights that are explicitly stated in the agreement with the copyright holder will be transferred to the buyer. Smart contracts make it possible to detail in a blockchain the terms of an agreement and the mechanism for its strict implementation. It is essentially the digital equivalent of a paper contract. You can use a token to secure ownership of an asset in a smart contract. It is also a digital counterpart - in this case, the counterpart of a security, known as a security token.

Can the user issue a token not for his work? How can this be regulated?

Since anyone who has access to a work can issue an NFT token for that work, it is possible that a non-institutional tokenizer (someone who has no rights to the work) is misusing and commercializing someone else's work in bad faith.

Regulatory mechanisms to limit such cases should focus on art platforms that allow the generation of tokenized NFT works. Such measures include requirements for mandatory identification and verification of users, introduction of additional tools to verify the authenticity of tokenized content and proof of rights to it. Of course, already now certain platforms for NFT generation require user verification and verification of the purity of NFT content, which removes a little bit of the acuteness of the issue.

The following rules must be observed:

• Post only original works, the copyright of which belongs to you and has not been transferred to third parties;
• If your work contains unoriginal content, make sure that the original work is in the public domain or that you have suitable arguments to prove its fair use.

With the development of cryptocurrency content comes a large number of fraudulent schemes, copyright infringers and in general people ready to take advantage of vulnerabilities in the system. However, if each member of the community consciously adheres to the extremely simple rules listed above, self-regulation will keep the movement honest and without outside support.