Can NFTs help stop art piracy?

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Que­bec artist Gaë­tane Dion sells ele­gant paint­ings of nature and colour­ful illus­tra­tions of female faces. Even though she sells her paint­ings in her stu­dio, her work can also be seen all over the inter­net.Roger Paquette/Handout

The career of Que­bec artist Gaë­tane Dion might be con­sid­ered a roar­ing suc­cess: Not only does she sell her ele­gant paint­ings of nature and colour­ful illus­tra­tions of female faces from her gallery-stu­dio in the East­ern Town­ships, but her work can also be seen all over the inter­net. Numer­ous online gal­leries and art blogs include her in their pages, you can browse through a book devot­ed to her art, reassem­ble one of her works as a dig­i­tal jig­saw puz­zle and, until recent­ly, you could even order up a Gaë­tane Dion repro­duc­tion print­ed on can­vas to look like a real paint­ing. Only trou­ble is, Dion her­self did not autho­rize any of these uses and makes no mon­ey from them.

“It’s shame­less,” Dion said, describ­ing mul­ti­ple web­sites that appear to have lift­ed sam­ples of her paint­ings and draw­ings from her own site. “It’s a theft.” Some sim­ply use them to pad their con­tent and attract eye­balls; one that was offer­ing repro­duc­tions of her images on paper or can­vas took down her work in Feb­ru­ary after an artists’ rights soci­ety sent it a legal letter.

Cana­di­an visu­al artists say this kind of pira­cy is ram­pant in their field, where unscrupu­lous oper­a­tors offer framed repro­duc­tions, dig­i­tal “paint­ings” and T‑shirts fea­tur­ing art­works to which they don’t hold the rights. Some­times the orig­i­nal artists are cred­it­ed; oth­er times water­marks and sig­na­tures are removed.

“It’s whack-a-mole. It’s all over the place,” said Toron­to copy­right lawyer Paul Bain. “There are micro aggres­sions all over the inter­net and you can’t police them all.”

A paint­ing by Gaë­tane Dion.Roger Paquette/Handout

Muse­ums have a sim­ple solu­tion: Most post low-res­o­lu­tion repro­duc­tions of the art­works in their col­lec­tions specif­i­cal­ly to dis­cour­age unau­tho­rized repro­duc­tion of copy­right works. (In Cana­da, images by artists who have been dead more than 50 years are in the pub­lic domain, a num­ber that will soon be updat­ed to match the U.S. stan­dard of 70 years, so peo­ple can repro­duce these works how­ev­er they want.) But for liv­ing artists or com­mer­cial gal­leries try­ing to sell con­tem­po­rary art from their web­sites, images need to be large enough that they are entic­ing and, as the copy­right hold­ers, it is up to the artists them­selves to police infringement.

Indige­nous artists are par­tic­u­lar­ly hard hit with numer­ous exam­ples of pirat­ed art show­ing up on the T‑shirts sold for Orange Shirt Day, a prob­lem that became par­tic­u­lar­ly acute last year after the dis­cov­ery of unmarked graves at the for­mer Kam­loops Indi­an Res­i­den­tial School, which brought added atten­tion to the Sept. 30 event.

“I start­ed to use social media as a mar­ket­ing tool; that’s how I share my work. I have to post it,” said Hawlii Pichette, a Mushkego-Cree illus­tra­tor from Lon­don, Ont., who has seen images from the free colour­ing pages she pro­vides for teach­ers used on T‑shirts. She says she is aware of nine dif­fer­ent online stores that have stolen her work. “I have to watch like a hawk.”

Indi­vid­u­als often say it is just too much work to chase down all the vio­lat­ing web­sites, most of which oper­ate off-shore, and send them legal take-down notices. Advo­cates for artists’ rights are dis­cussing oth­er solu­tions, ask­ing if the blockchain tech­nol­o­gy behind the NFTs so hyped in the art world could actu­al­ly help artists con­trol their imagery by includ­ing dig­i­tal signatures.

“I’m bull­ish about the tech­nol­o­gy and what it can do,” said Roanie Levy, pres­i­dent of Access Copy­right, a Cana­di­an orga­ni­za­tion that licens­es authors’ and artists’ work. “But I am also very cau­tious that the tech­nol­o­gy be devel­oped in a way that is respect­ful of cre­ators so it doesn’t run away and we wind up hav­ing to put the tooth­paste back in the tube.”

In the­o­ry, artists can indi­cate that a file con­tain­ing their work, whether it is dig­i­tal art or a repro­duc­tion of a phys­i­cal piece, belongs exclu­sive­ly to them by reg­is­ter­ing it with a time stamp on a blockchain, a tam­per-resis­tant data­base. That is the tech­nol­o­gy behind the head­line-grab­bing NFTs, which some artists and musi­cians have been sell­ing for mil­lions. (NFT stands for non-fun­gi­ble token. Fun­gi­ble assets, such as cur­ren­cies, are divis­i­ble and inter­change­able; non-fun­gi­ble assets, such as real estate, aren’t. The tokens apply the unique­ness of non-fun­gi­ble col­lec­tables and orig­i­nal art to dig­i­tal files, which could actu­al­ly be repro­duced ad infinitum.)

But NFTs can be expen­sive to mint, and require some know-how. Worse yet, many are already sub­ject to their own own­er­ship dis­putes as unscrupu­lous play­ers flood a boom­ing mar­ket. Artists com­plain that OpenSea, the largest NFT mar­ket, is filled with exam­ples of pla­gia­rism or out­right pira­cy, where sell­ers offer NFTs of art to which they don’t own the rights. In the music indus­try, where artists are look­ing at NFTs as a way of rais­ing mon­ey from fans, there have also been mul­ti­ple com­plaints. In Feb­ru­ary, a new plat­form called Hit­Piece was offer­ing NFTs of what appeared to be record­ings avail­able from stream­ing ser­vices, to the out­rage of musi­cians who had nev­er been asked to license their songs for this use.

“Blockchain is not a mag­ic bul­let, par­tic­u­lar­ly when you are deal­ing with pira­cy. There will be a need for artists to con­tin­ue to be vig­i­lant to see if their work is being used with­out autho­riza­tion,” Levy said.

To help artists, Access Copy­right worked with the Cana­di­an Artists Rep­re­sen­ta­tion, Copy­right Visu­al Arts and the Regroupe­ment des artistes en arts visuels du Québec to devel­op a plat­form called Imp­ri­mo, where artists can cat­a­logue their work, their exhi­bi­tion his­to­ry and their biog­ra­phy for a small month­ly fee. It gives the artist two lev­els of blockchain pro­tec­tion, reg­is­ter­ing both their claim to an art­work and a dig­i­tal sig­na­ture, a sys­tem that lets artists authen­ti­cate their works so buy­ers know they are get­ting autho­rized exam­ples. A QR code links to rep­re­sen­ta­tions of an art work and a time­line shows its jour­ney – the all-impor­tant sto­ry of its prove­nance as it changes hands.

All these secu­ri­ty fea­tures may not stop pira­cy of images lift­ed from oth­er sites. What they do, how­ev­er, is help build a mar­ket­place where con­sumers would con­sid­er authen­ti­ca­tion reg­is­tered on a blockchain as a basic require­ment before buy­ing any art.

Not every­body is con­vinced the sys­tem will work. Lou-ann Neel is an Indige­nous artist and arts admin­is­tra­tor from B.C. who has also seen her work show up on orange T‑shirts with nei­ther her per­mis­sion nor her sig­na­ture. She is skep­ti­cal that Indige­nous artists will join the plat­form and main­ly wants to see tougher laws.

The Cana­di­an Copy­right Act “has no teeth,” she said. “Peo­ple can be told to stop but there are no repercussions.”

Mean­while, Lucin­da Turn­er, a Van­cou­ver activist, would like to a see a reg­istry specif­i­cal­ly devot­ed to Indige­nous art. She is not Indige­nous but has worked to com­bat for­eign knock-offs of north­west coast carv­ing, and thinks blockchain might be par­tic­u­lar­ly use­ful in the sec­ondary mar­ket, reas­sur­ing buy­ers they are get­ting the real thing. She trawls the inter­net look­ing for unau­tho­rized uses of work by 40 Indige­nous artists she has vol­un­teered to rep­re­sent, and sends out take-down let­ters under the terms of the U.S. Dig­i­tal Mil­len­ni­um Copy­right Act. Last sum­mer, after the dis­cov­ery of unmarked graves at the Kam­loops res­i­den­tial school and in the lead up to Orange Shirt Day, she was send­ing out as many as 30 let­ters every day. “I’m strug­gling to keep up but I feel com­pelled to do it,” she said.

On the oth­er side of the coun­try, Dion can empathize as she takes a break from chas­ing after infring­ing web­sites in Spain, Den­mark and Rus­sia, and pre­pares for her new exhi­bi­tion at the Bromp­ton cul­tur­al cen­tre in Sher­brooke, Que. There, at least, she can trust that nobody will lift her paint­ings off the walls.

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