New protocol aims to improve on-chain NFT intellectual property rights

Quick Take

  • V-Art Protocol helps embed NFT intellectual property on the NEAR and Ethereum blockchains, with support for Aurora and Polygon coming this year and Solana in the next. 
  • The tool helps improve the visibility of intellectual property rights for NFT projects — a long-running issue in the space.

V-Art's new tool, called the V-Art Protocol, is aimed to help protect IP rights and improve NFT project licensing and will go live on Nov. 2, the blockchain-based digital content monetization platform said.

Projects can verify, protect and manage their IP rights on NEAR and Ethereum blockchains, and V-Art aims to add Aurora and Polygon this year and Solana next year, V-Art CEO Anastasiia Gliebova told The Block at the web3 Summit in Lisbon. The firm raised $1.4 million in seed funding thus far.

NFT IP rights, particularly when it touches upon copyright, have led to skirmishes between NFT project leaders and holders in the past. Case in point was CryptoPunks created by Larva Labs. The NFT project did not have any public guidelines for IP or copyright for years — until users attempted to monetize their NFT, then LarvaLabs sought legal action against such holders. 

THE SCOOP

Keep up with the latest news, trends, charts and views on crypto and DeFi with a new biweekly newsletter from The Block's Frank Chaparro

By signing-up you agree to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy
By signing-up you agree to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy

Partly stemming from unclear NFT IP rights came projects who eschewed copyright altogether such as Nouns, The Block previously reported

With additional reporting by Lucy Harley-McKeown


© 2023 The Block. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

About Author

MK Manoylov has been a reporter for The Block since 2020 — joining just before bitcoin surpassed $20,000 for the first time. Since then, MK has written nearly 1,000 articles for the publication, covering any and all crypto news but with a penchant toward NFT, metaverse, web3 gaming, funding, crime, hack and crypto ecosystem stories. MK holds a graduate degree from New York University's Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program (SHERP) and has also covered health topics for WebMD and Insider. You can follow MK on X @MManoylov and on LinkedIn.

Editor

To contact the editors of this story:
Madhu Unnikrishnan at
[email protected]
Christiana Loureiro at
[email protected]