Blockchain, IP Experts Explore the World of NFTs and Web3
Blockchain, the metaverse, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), virtual reality (VR) and Web3 are a few of the heavily hyped new technologies that at least some members of the media and entertainment industry are not yet familiar with, according to experts on those technologies and intellectual property (IP) who spoke Sept. 21 at the Entertainment Evolution Symposium (EES).
Some of these new technologies “don’t make a lot of sense to people on paper,” Christiane Kinney, president of Kinney Law, P.C., a boutique law firm specializing in IP and entertainment law matters, conceded at the start of the session “NFTs and the Metaverse: Culture, Community, Innovation and Web3.”
She and Tori Stevens, CEO of SuperNFT, walked attendees through the anatomy of an NFT sale, examined the worlds of virtual reality and the metaverse, and discussed how companies, artists and brands are creating and cultivating new and exciting opportunities for fans within Web3.
Their goal was to “show you guys what the community is about and why we’re excited about Web3,” Kinney told attendees.
After getting a sense that not everybody attending knew what an NFT was, Kinney explained it’s a digital token that is unique and “can’t be replaced.”
She told attendees to think of fine art. “The Mona Lisa, it’s one of a kind, non-fungible in that it’s not an exchangeable one-to-one ratio,” she said.
The NFT was “really something that was created out of a means of trying to create digital scarcity,” she said, explaining: “You have all of these digital assets online and anybody can copy and anybody can steal and share them…. So how do you create a sense of ownership in the digital landscape?”
The NFT was a “means to try and address that by having a decentralized ledger that gets stored on the blockchain across multiple decentralized data blocks,” she said, adding: “You’re going to have a sale that’s supported by a smart contract for a programming code. So it’s verifiable and you create this sense of ownership.”
She conceded, however, that “doesn’t mean people aren’t going to still copy and pirate and steal images.” But she explained: “There’s a verifiable way to establish ownership.”
Meanwhile, the part about NFTs that’s “exciting to me as an IP attorney and somebody that represents a lot of artists was the concept of this being transferable and that artists can earn royalties from the secondary sales.”
That, she said has never happened before. The idea that an artist is able to “continue making royalties as this keeps getting sold on the secondary market – that’s really exciting,” she told attendees.
“And there’s obviously numerous applications,” running the gamut from art, music, collectibles, virtual lands, crypto gaming, unique items in the metaverse space, event tickets and so on, she pointed out.
This is an especially “exciting time for digital artists,” she said, noting an artist can conceivably make $50,000 to create a graphic that’s going to be this digital NFT.
“So digital artists are making some great money in this space,” she added.
The Entertainment Evolution Symposium (EES) was presented by the Pepperdine Graziadio Business School Institute for Entertainment, Media and Sports (IEMS) and the Hollywood IT Society (HITS) and was sponsored by Iron Mountain, Signiant, Whip Media, Atos, Fortinet, FPT Software, invenioLSI, Perforce, Vision Media, and EIDR.