Booming NFT art market plagued by ‘mind-blowing’ fraud

Palmer, the California artist, says sometimes he gets dozens of alerts a day from DeviantArt that his work is being sold without his permission on OpenSea.Last year, he successfully petitioned OpenSea by email to take down some auctions of his work.But, in recent weeks the platform has been requiring artists submit a Digital Millennium Copyright request, the formal legal mechanism for copyright owners to ask that their work be taken off a hosting platform, Palmer said.”I’ve given up submitting these requests, it’s just too time consuming,” he said.Artists like Palmer want platforms like OpenSea, which was recently valued at $13 billion, to invest more in proactively ensuring artists’ work isn’t ripped off.Some have given up petitioning OpenSea and have started submitting their complaints directly to Google, which hosts the images on OpenSea’s auctions.The OpenSea spokesperson said in a statement that the company is scaling its efforts “across customer support, trust and safety, and site integrity so we can move faster to protect and empower our community and creators.”James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital law at Cornell Law School, said as long as the NFT platforms are responding to complaints from copyright holders, they are operating within the law – even if scammers are running rampant.Grimmelmann said NFT marketplaces are facing the same thorny issue that the older generation of internet platforms is still grappling with: how to fairly moderate online content at a massive scale.”NFTs don’t solve this problem,” he said. “These platforms are just the latest to discover how hard that really is.”

Source: Booming NFT art market plagued by ‘mind-blowing’ fraud