Imagine, if you will, that you’re an artist, working hard every day to perfect your craft, pushing your creative talents to their limits. Hoping to make your mark on this world, hoping to finally stand out among thousands upon thousands of others just like you.
The life of an artist is remarkably difficult. The struggling artist may be a cliche to most of us but for the person living that life, the struggle is a reality. Every artist in the traditional and modern sense goes through this painful cycle of life. Be they a painter, a writer, a composer, a graphic designer, a singer, a street performer, a dancer, or actor… Each of them dreams to get noticed one day and earn appreciation for their work.
Opposite that dream is the unwanted end that one will pass through this life, unknown, unrecognized, and unloved.
Plagiarism: the ugly side of NFTs no one wants to talk about
But for many artists, the waking nightmare would be to one day find out that their work has been stolen, claimed by others to be their own, profited off by thieves.
So when artists read the news to find that anonymous crypto users have been stealing their publicly viewable work to transform them into NFTs and peddling them to buyers for insane amounts of money, suffice to say, it’s a heinous crime.
For some, like RJ Palmer, famed for his hyper realistic illustrations of Pokémon, tokenize tweets of his works via Tokenized Tweets, and selling them for money, he slammed the actions of these irresponsible “randos”:
[embed Tweet: https://twitter.com/arvalis/status/1369230566843813891]
Palmer notes that while T-shirt makers and sites are common violators of artist copyright claims, anonymous NFT makers are much more difficult to hunt down via a DMCA takedown and admitted in an interview with VICE: “It’s very concerning from a rights standpoint.”
Just two months ago, popular game Wildfire’s creator Dan Hindes called out NFT blockchain game Epic Hero Battles for plagiarizing his art to use as NFTs. Their response? A hasty apology and removal of all his art from their game and website, followed by the deletion of their Twitter account.
[embed Tweet: https://twitter.com/dhindes/status/1436542723016708098]
More tragic is that NFT rogues have even plagiarised works of deceased artists, presumably thinking they wouldn’t be able to chase them down for copyright violations. Beloved DeviantArt artist Qing Han, affectionately known as “Qinni”, who passed away in February after losing her battle with cancer, has reportedly had her art stolen and put up on NFT listings. Her social media caretaker continues to fight an ongoing battle to protect her work posthumously.
[Embed: https://twitter.com/QinniArt/status/1468466103655489536]
Questioning the benefits of NFTs for creative artists
When NFTs first made their way around the crypto space, the token technology was touted as a means to securely and verifiably authenticate ownership of creative content. Specifically, early NFT projects and those that continue to garner attention around the world today, help bring much-needed visibility to artists who would otherwise lack eyes on their product, while at the same time guaranteeing ownership to art buyers and collectors in ways that physical art could not.
There is no denying the success of NFT in helping to solve this critical problem of “who owns digital artwork”. Especially when digital art can be easily duplicated endlessly, the unique properties of non-fungible tokens allow buyers to confirm ownership with the original creator.
Just yesterday, 12-year old Nyla Hayes sold her collection of art NFTs for a cool $1.6 million — after years of frustration trying to promote her work on traditional platforms such as social media. All her fortunes changed when she uploaded her art as NFTs on NFT listing marketplace OpenSea. In the same week, an art convention in Miami received a lot of buzz from artists because of the NFTs being promoted there. Art journalist Sophie Haigney notes that though many NFT buyers are speculative, within the art scene, there are still many collectors who see the aesthetic value of “buying the proof of owning something”.
Upholding the protection of artists and ownership of their work
As a blockchain gaming company and a creator of technology — namely, the EIP3664 protocol that we believe will enhance gaming with entropy-increasing metaverses — we at Cradles are creators. So respecting the code of ethics of creatives means that we only use original artwork and design in our upcoming game. Even in our mini-game, we’ve ensured that each Dragontar is built and drawn from scratch.
More importantly, whenever our users purchase or are given these Dragontars, they fully own the NFT associated with the unique character, which bears their full ownership of the Dragontar. In short, if you own a Dragontar, you own all of it, including its creative rights, and can be assured it’s a unique, original piece of art from us at Cradles.
Importantly, once our game proper is released, the Cradles metaverse will also allow every player to contribute their own creations to a living, breathing world. And true to the spirit of creative rights ownership, every user that creates content owns that content, be it a piece of music, imagery, an in-game item, or a storyline. Tokenized, ready to be exchanged or sold securely, while protecting the ownership rights of all participants.
As we grow our community, building and expanding the Cradles metaverse, we will also continually remind our community members of our shared responsibility to respect and uphold the copyrights of the artists. Ultimately, we can only lead by example and allow the community to self-govern and self-police themselves as Cradians, as it should be in a decentralized metaverse society.
In this way, we can all do our part in helping ensure that the blockchain gaming sector, and NFT technology, fulfils the promise of empowering artists.
============================================================================
Join the conversation and get the latest updates!
Website: http://www.cradles.io/
Cradles Official Forum: https://forum.cradles.io/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/cradlesio
Discord: https://discord.gg/cradles
Telegram Group: https://t.me/cradles_official_group
Telegram Channel: https://t.me/cradles_official
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Cradles_Official/
