Craft Focus - August/September 2022 (Issue 92)

89 ACID To find out more, visit www.acid.uk.com Blockchain sale A divorced mother has alleged that her ex-husband showed her daughter’s artwork to a friend Ben Flowers, who decided he could make himself some money from the sale of her work. As X is a minor, we are withholding her name. He originally messaged X saying he was looking to release some of her work on the blockchain/crypto. She said she didn’t really know much about it but would be interested to know more. At no point did she give him any permission to use/copy/edit any of her work. A couple of weeks later out of the blue he messaged X again to say, “Guess what, you are officially an NFT artist with your first sale. The first few are up for $25 but for the life of that piece will get 10 per cent split with me of course, so if it sells for $100 say 10 times in 12 months then for that one piece $100 a year in royalties, when they hopefully get more and more popular they could go for a lot more if I market them in right places and the right way…WELL DONE your art is brilliant.” He then messaged again later that day to say, “Second one sold. Download this app and I will start putting the proceeds in it, on your way to becoming an artist millionaire.” X was obviously very shocked and upset to know that other people had now bought her art online and were saying that they owned it. X asked, “Are you selling my art?” to which Ben replied, “I assure you it’s not the actual art’.” X told him he had no permission to do this, and she wanted him to delete all the images online and stop selling her work. Her mother has managed to get website OpenSea to take down the images and Emoon.space has now closed down. Apparently, they got hacked and had lots of NFTs stolen. Further images were recently discovered on OpenSea and again these were immediately taken down by OpenSea. She then discovered this man was also selling her art on ‘Isengard’ as previously mentioned. She has contacted them requesting the images are taken down as they are being fraudulently sold. Fraudulent activity Isengard has advised they have reviewed the case and been in contact with the seller. It has temporarily marked the images as possible scam but will not remove the images or prevent the seller from advertising them. They advised what the seller does is not technically against any policy that they have, and laws apply differently in different countries of residence. Therefore they cannot completely remove the NFT’s from the marketplace as it would result in a complete destruction of their decentralisation foundation. They further advised reporting the NFT’s to the ‘Elrond’ network’ for further assistance which X’s mother has done. The ‘Elrond’ Network is the platform used by ‘Isengard.’ She has also messaged this man via Twitter demanding he removes and deletes all images of X’s art work as this is copyright infringement but sadly received no response. @Flenart, FlenCali are attributed to Ben Flowers. She is only 15 but is planning to go on and study art at college and make a career in art so ACID thinks it’s important to do whatever we can going forward to ensure her artwork is safe. ACID’s CEO Dids Macdonald, OBE., said, “Having reviewed this disturbing case study, X is now a member of ACID, and all her existing artwork will be lodged on the ACID Databank, and she will be able to use the powerful ACID logo of deterrence around all her work. Using anyone’s work without permission is against the law, using a minor’s work without permission is even more deplorable. World IP Day in 2022 theme is IP and Youth, it is very much hoped that IP education, deterrence, prevention and support, ACID’s key objectives, will focus on the necessity to promote and IP and Youth and also recognise the real dangers of exploitation.” X’s mother continues, “We have copies of all the images this man had on the other sites before they were taken down and all the messages, he has sent to her before he deleted them. In one of the messages he said she had made $180 in the first day and a half and he would save it for her. To our knowledge he sold four images on ’emoon space’ before it closed and it looks like he has sold several on the ‘Isengard’ site, although these are crypto sites of which I have little knowledge, so it is difficult to understand all the data and figure out how much money he has sold them for.” ACID is determined to do everything it can to help this mother and her artist daughter to resolve this upsetting matter and this formed a case study sent to the Intellectual Property Office in their Call for Views on the fitness of the IP framework for artists and designers. NFTs are A non-fungible token is a non-interchangeable unit of data stored on a blockchain, a form of digital ledger, which can be sold and traded. Types of NFT data units may be associated with digital files such as photos, videos, and audio, according to Wikipedia.

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