The UK government is in danger of regulating non-fungible tokens (NFTs) in a way that does not suit the true nature of the nascent technology, says Mintable CEO and founder Zach Burks.
In an interview with Cointelegraph, Burks said he believes a recent report from a UK parliamentary committee significantly overstates the role NFTs play in copyright infringement and fails to recognize that they are more than just volatile digital images.
“NFTs are in a transition phase where they are moving away from the speculative boom of PFPs and are now moving into the utilities of brands deploying NFTs on a wide range of different things,” Burks explained.
In the October 11 report, the Culture, Media and Sport Committee urged the government to take action to protect artists and content creators from copyright infringements associated with NFTs.
nft marketplaces must do more to address the magnitude of copyright infringement on their platforms.
We have published our report on “nft and Blockchain: risks for sport and culture”.
Know more: https://t.co/4pYE6gAngw
Read our report: https://t.co/XIj0LYlcrX@cj_dinenage pic.twitter.com/GTbtOJCM8m— Culture, Media and Sport Committee (@CommonsCMS) October 11, 2023
Burks acknowledged that protecting artists’ copyrights and intellectual property rights is of utmost importance, and pointed to Mintable’s own intellectual property protection algorithm that it uses to prevent plagiarism on its platform.
However, he explained that while these issues should be a top priority for all nft platforms, they are not exactly nft-specific concerns.
“These are problems inherent to the Internet, not NFTs.”
“Regulators say, ‘Well, now NFTs are being used for copyright infringement.’ Well, yes, WordPress is too. So is YouTube. So is Spotify,” she said. “And how do you combat that? Well, some of the largest and most advanced companies in the world, like Google, are working on this.”
“They have hundreds of billions of dollars and they can’t solve the problem of fighting copyrighted material on YouTube. “It’s not like this problem arose out of nowhere because NFTs were created.”
Burks, who corresponds weekly with UK government officials about NFTs, said that while nft platforms should do everything they can to protect artists, it is up to regulators to take a more nuanced view of NFTs as a whole. .
It was a great time speaking at the 40th International Symposium on Economic Crime at the University of Cambridge in the UK!
I learned a lot, met some amazing people, and hopefully educated the people who listened to my numerous panels about NFTs and the blockchain space! pic.twitter.com/txExSVqTIb
—Zach Burks (@ZachSpaded) September 14, 2023
“There are many ways you can use nft, whether it’s for your car registrations, whether it’s for your property records, whether it’s a bank settlement document, whether it’s a backing layer, whether it’s a complete supply chain system or a biofuels company. he said.
“It is not just a work of art or a financial instrument. (…) An nft is effectively a website.”
“If my website is used to sell books, I will be governed by the laws used to sell books. If I sell drugs on my website, then you don’t need new laws. I’m still selling drugs, right? she said, laughing.
In Burks’ view, NFTs are an extremely broad technology capable of a wide range of different functions, and a committee declaring that they should be regulated as pieces of digital art could be a major setback in revealing the true utility of the technology.
“The (committee) said the government should implement the EU 17 copyright directive on NFTs, which is bad in the sense that it’s a really broad umbrella,” he said.
Related: NFTs Aren’t Dead, They’re Just Resting
In the report, the committee said the “most pressing issue” raised by NFTs was the risk to artists’ intellectual property rights arising from the ease and speed with which tokens can be minted. He suggested that they be regulated under a relatively narrow copyright directive: Article 17 of the European Union Copyright Directive.
“When you say that all NFTs must have this element of regulatory coverage, it’s the equivalent of saying, ‘We need this piece of legislation that covers this piece of technology,’ which might have started with the Edison light bulb, but now we’re dealing with Teslas,” Burks said.
“So we need to be very careful when it comes to these kinds of general regulatory frameworks that we apply to NFTs as a system, rather than looking at NFTs for what they really are.”
Ultimately, Burks thinks the UK government could take some notes from regulators in Singapore, where the government judges NFTs by their specific use cases.
“Regulators in Singapore look at what an nft actually is and then go from there,” he explained. “Let’s say you have an nft of a Tesla share. Well, then that’s a security. Oh, this is an nft of a bag of cocaine that facilitates drug sales? “Then they regulate the same way they would illicit drugs.”
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