The Protection Of Digital Art
This is a reprint of an article that appears on page 54 in the February 2022 issue of the dual-language Italian and English virtual magazine ArtOnWorld.
If you turn over almost any painting, you will find markings by the artist, perhaps a date. And if that artist has been fortunate enough to have their work exhibited in galleries or exhibitions, there will be additional markings used for inventory management and consignment tracking. These markings tell a story and establish authenticity, but digital art has until recently lacked such features.
The challenge with digital art is that each piece can be copied and shared, and no one can tell which is the original. Contemporary artists producing works on canvas, paper or other materials know this and so only permit low-resolution images to be circulated when promoting their exhibitions. This is aesthetically unsatisfactory if they are presenting their works in a multimedia setting such as in a university art course. Most problematic is the fact that these artists cannot monetise their digital work.
With the wide availability of computers and tablets, a new generation of artists such as Nam June Paik chose to create in the digital realm. Until recently, they also used lower-resolution images whenever possible, and watermarked them to prevent copyright theft.
We are now witnessing a renaissance of digital art, which is attributed to the new technology of Non-Fungible Tokens or NFTs. An NFT is a form of title to an item, which makes it possible for buyer and seller to agree to what is being exchanged — even though it is digital. The ‘tokenisation’ of digital art enables marketplaces to emerge where artists can confidently sell high resolution original art, regardless of whether it is a photograph, illustration, digital collage, or a multimedia production.
NFTs provide a means to both annotate digital artwork — like the backs of canvases did in years past — and they make it easy to record transfers of ownership. In fact, NFTs can ensure royalties to the artist for secondary sales, which is completely new to the art world. This means that, without negotiation, the artist or their successors can earn something every time their work is resold in the future.
A token is a transferable digital asset. Being non-fungible simply means that the asset cannot be broken apart and resold in pieces, like five 20 dollar bills exchanged for a single 100 dollar bill. When a non-fungible token is created, it records certain rights and permissions, including rights held by the creator and permissions granted to a buyer. In the case of digital art, the buyer would typically have only non-commercial exhibition rights. The copyright, production or performance rights are all retained by the original artist.
NFTs are typically created by a mechanism known as a ‘smart contract’, which is essentially a simple program recorded on a blockchain. Because it’s on a blockchain, it is permanent and tamperproof, which is great for the protection of artists and their work. Recorded in the smart contract are royalty schedules which assure the artist of payment when the token asset is transferred. Ownership transfers are also recorded in the smart contract.
The real innovation is that an NFT acts as a proxy for the digital artwork, much like a title deed does for a real estate property being sold. Since the artist creates only one or a limited number of tokens for each piece of digital art, the tokens have scarcity and become collectors’ items. This is why, despite the fact that the buyer only gets bragging rights to ‘ownership’ of the digital artwork, NFTs can sometimes sell for very high prices.
But there are subtle problems with NFTs that artists need to be made aware of. The most important of these problems is that NFTs are wrongly conflated with proof of authenticity, which they are not. To understand this, we need to dig a little deeper.
When an artist ‘drops’ a new piece of digital art and then offers to sell it as an NFT, they need to work with a mint and a marketplace. To keep things simple, we’ll use the example of OpenSea, which performs both functions and is in fact the world’s largest digital art marketplace. The artist mints the NFT by declaring the rights, providing a copy of their digital file, and paying fees for creation of the smart contract.
What OpenSea does is transfer a copy of the digital file to a decentralised hosting network along with a metadata file which contains information about the artwork. The NFT that OpenSea mints contains a link to the metadata file, which itself links to the digital file, and it is this NFT that is sold on their marketplace. Here is where two problems arise:
- The link could break because of changes in the hosting network.
- The link could become inaccessible if OpenSea ever faces technical issues or closes down.
Either of these problems would cause the digital file to disappear and when that happens, the NFT becomes arguably worthless.
On top of this, the digital file that the artist uploads to OpenSea may or may not be the same one they copyrighted as an original piece of digital art. This can happen if the original is very high resolution and the filesize is larger than the storage limit allowed by OpenSea, or if the creator intentionally provides a thumbnail (for example, a scene from a digital movie, in JPG format). In these cases, the NFT is a proxy in name only, and it is certainly not a proof of authenticity because it does not link to the original copyrighted work.
A savvy digital art collector would be looking for a separate Certificate Of Authenticity (COA) for the artwork on which the NFT is based. A proper and reliable COA would be anchored to a blockchain, thereby tamper-proof, and have the following attributes:
- It would contain a hash (or digital fingerprint) of the copyrighted artwork.
- It would contain a thumbnail of the copyrighted artwork.
- It would contain a signature of the creator (or of someone who can attest to the artwork’s authenticity).
These types of certificates exist and can be inexpensively produced by the artist or their agent, for each and every work, regardless of whether they intend to produce an NFT. For unique pieces which the artist decides to release as NFTs, the NFT metadata should include a link to the separately verifiable Certificate of Authenticity.
COAs make buying on markets like OpenSea more trustworthy, because the buyer knows exactly what they are purchasing and the opportunity for fraud is greatly reduced. These certificates will help maintain value in secondary sales and they free the artist from worry that their artwork is copied, because only the holder of the NFTs has a verifiable ‘ownership’. In fact, with COAs and NFTs, creators can freely share their digital art using social media.
Contemporary artists producing physical works and owners of old masterpieces can also monetise digital versions. COAs on indelible digital ID tags, either QR codes or microchips, can be attached to the back of artworks on canvas, paper or other material. At a minimum, an image hash could be ink-marked onto the back of a framed art. This links the physical art to the copyrighted digital file, using the hash as a fingerprint. This simple procedure can prevent digital forgeries of great works by living artists and those who have passed on.
Bill Claxton is founder and CEO of NextID Pte Ltd, a blockchain tech company based in Singapore. His company NextID developed the world’s first certificate of authenticity solution for NFTs which uses image hashes as digital fingerprints.