Are NFTs Ready to Keep Australian Artists Engaged?

TL;DR

This paper empirically examines the structure and security of NFTs in protecting Australian and Indigenous artists' copyright, concluding that current NFT technology is not yet suitable for this purpose.

Contribution

It provides an in-depth analysis of NFT structures and evaluates their effectiveness in safeguarding artists' rights, highlighting current limitations.

Findings

NFTs do not reliably secure artists' copyrights

Data from various storage methods show inconsistencies

NFTs currently lack sufficient security for artist protection

Abstract

Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) offer a promising mechanism to protect Australian and Indigenous artists' copyright. They represent and transfer the value of artwork in digital form. Before adopting NFTs to protect Australian artwork, we in this paper investigate them empericially. We focus on examining the details of NFT structure. We start from the underlying structure of NFTs to show how they represent copyright for both artists and production owners, as well as how they aim to safeguard or secure the value of digital artworks. We then involve data collection from various types of sources with different storage methods, including on-chain, centralized, and decentralized systems. Based on both metadata and artwork content, we present our analysis and discussion on the following key issues: copyright, security and artist identification. The final results of the evaluation, unfortnately, show that the NFT is NOT ready to protect Australian and Indigenous artists' copyright.