Do not sell your friend’s art as an NFT

I get it – despite all the warnings about climate change, you or someone you know big Scrooge McDuck-sized dollar signs in their eyes after realizing a pinch of blockchain is all you need to turn a JPG image into cold hard cash, and now you’re turning something – anything – into ‘ an NFT while the initial gold rush lasts.

Then you see it: something that does not exactly belong to you. You are not going to sell that, right? And yet, according to indie game developer Jason Rohrer, according to Kotaku: sells NFT copies of 155 digital paintings he originally commissioned for his game The Castle Ladder as individual artworks online. What … I mean can be does he legally have the rights, even though NFTs did not exist then?

Except that Rohrer does not even try to pretend to be his – he credits each artist on his new crypto-gallery page and calls his’ personal friends’ and says he is willing to share with them if they ‘a lot of auction money and overdue royalties. ”

According to them, some of his ‘friends’ were not particularly happy about this level of generosity Kotaku, and you should go read their biting answers in full. Here’s one to start with:

Adam Saltsman, developer of Canabalt and Overland, described the NFT auction as a ‘lose-lose proposal for me in the short term’. “Either Jason does more gross public shit with my art, or else I should like to … talk to Jason and spend part of my life on it, which is also struggling,” Saltsman emailed Kotaku said.

With press staff, it is unclear whether Rohrer realizes the irony that he continues to use the phrase “PROTECT WHAT IS YOU” as his header on the site. (However, at the request of the artist, he removed some pieces from the site.)

I have to admit, I’m curious: would you ever buy an NFT from someone who do not have the art produced? Since an NFT is in fact a digital signature, I rather own the original artist.

Maybe that’s why no one has yet bought this famous photo from a famous anonymous 4Chan message about how “literally everything can be art.” Then a framed copy of the message was sold once for almost $ 100,000.