Traple Konarski Podrecki & Partners - Tomasz Targosz, Lexology ; NFTs in Copyright
"Frequently, whenever some new technology-related trend emerges, papers that attempt to juxtapose it with various fields of intellectual property law abound, according to the principle X and …. law. Often there is very little that is new behind this, and the described legal “issues” are formulated in an artificial way and are not difficult to solve. A text regarding NFTs in copyright could also be classed as a text of this kind, but in this case there are at least a few questions that need to be addressed. Even if NFTs do not have great practical significance, as some people believe, this category will probably not disappear entirely. Therefore it is worth examining the issue of the areas in which copyright law and NFTs might come into contact, and what implications this has (or doesn’t have, which is no less important).
The simplest way to describe NFTs is information in a blockchain, representing some resource (digital goods). The distinction between an NFT (non-fungible token) and fungible tokens is not so much that they cannot be exchanged (notably, ‘trading’ in NFTs is one of the reasons for which they exist) but that they are unique (no two data chains are alike). This feature means that NFTs bring to the digital world something rare that is known in the physical world. A good example is a genuine work of sculpture of which there is only one. NFTs and copyright converge because the item that can be represented by the token may be an item that qualifies as creative, i.e. is a work as defined in copyright law, although of course this is not essential (for example Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s first tweet, “converted” into an NFT, sold for almost USD 3 million and is not a work). If an NFT is not linked to a work, it will not be a matter of interest in copyright law. For this reason, we will focus on cases that do involve a work, such as a digital file containing a photograph, video, etc.)."
