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NFTs (Nonfungible tokens) is currently taking the digital art and collectables world by storm. Just as everyone worldwide believed Bitcoin was the digital answer to currency, NFTs are now pitched as the digital answer to collectibles. As a result, digital artists are seeing their lives changing thanks to the massive sales to a new crypto audience. But now, there are talks about NFTs that help authors preserve copyrights of their books. Basically, Nonfungible tokens that are built from currently existing books are normally bound to copyrights. However, in the case of Tezos Farmation, the copyright had already expired. The text from the book can be used by any party for free. This triggers a very interesting question: How can NFTs preserve copyrights and royalties for books with expired copyrights?
According to Cointelegraph, the NFT application in the publishing industry is so far mostly focused on books that still have royalties and are within their copyright lifespan. But there are authors whose work lives on long past both their mortal existence and that of their copyrights. Can NFTs provide their estates a means to extend the life of the book and its royalties?
Estates holding copyrights that are about to fall into the public domain have a unique opportunity to create a tangible asset in the form of NFTs from the intangible goodwill embedded in the disconnected community.
A good example would be Winnie-the-Pooh, a fictional anthropomorphic teddy bear created by English author A. A. Milne and English illustrator E. H. Shepard is loved by fans all over the world. The first collection of stories about the character was created in 1926. After almost 96 years, the copyright had expired, and the book moved into the public domain on January 1, 2022. The estate holding the copyright will receive no future value from Winnie-the-Pooh, even though the commercial value of such a worldwide famous cartoon character will remain high for a long time.
NFTs have actually been around since 2015, but they are now experiencing a boost in popularity thanks to several factors. First, and perhaps most obviously, is the normalization and excitement of cryptocurrencies and the underlying blockchain frameworks. Beyond the technology itself is the combination of fandom, the economics of royalties, and the laws of scarcity. Consumers all want to get in on the opportunity to own unique digital content and potentially hold them as a type of investment.
March was when NFTs really started making headlines. It was all down to auction house Christie's record-breaking NFT sale: a piece of digital art, called "Everydays: The First 5,000 Days", created by Mike Winkelmann, a graphic designer better known in the online art world as "Beeple", sold for US$69.3 million. It was a collage of 5,000 pieces of digital art that Beeple has been producing daily since 2007.
Authenticity is the name of the game with NFTs. Digital collectibles contain distinguishing information that makes them distinct from any other NFT and easily verifiable, thanks to the blockchain. Creating and circulating fake collectibles doesn't work because each item can be traced back to the original creator or issuer. And, unlike cryptocurrencies, they can't be directly exchanged with one another (like baseball cards in real life) because no two are the same.
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