Stolen art sold as NFTs

Last year, $25 billion worth of NFTs were sold. But this growth has given thieves a chance to steal.

NFT art sales are booming. Specifically, without the authorization of some artists.

NFTs were marketed to the public as a solution that would guarantee artists would be rewarded for their work. Now, a large number of authors are working hard to put a stop to a wave of piracy.

Aja Trier had previously been the target of theft by digital burglars.

San Antonio-based painter Trier frequently reinterprets Vincent van Gogh's "Starry Night" by incorporating canines or dinosaurs into the scene, or recasting it as a barren terrain or the fictional city of Mordor from "The Lord of the Rings." She has caught people over the years who were selling pirated versions of her work on Amazon and other online marketplaces, and she has successfully stopped them from doing so. She sells versions of her work on mugs, mouse pads, and pillows.

However, as a result of the meteoric rise of the NFT art market, criminals have begun stealing her work at a rate that is absolutely staggering. An anonymous user on OpenSea, the preeminent marketplace for the rapidly developing NFT art market, began posting tens of thousands of listings of her work, many of which were duplicates, for sale around a week ago. She was only successful in persuading the platform to remove them after thirty-seven of them had already been sold.

Trier stated that the people in question kept "taking and remaking them as NFTs." It's so blatantly obvious. And if it can happen to me, then it can happen to anyone."

The tale of Trier is one that is all too familiar in the rapidly developing market for NFT artwork sales. According to RJ Palmer, an artist from San Francisco who designs creatures and monsters both as commissioned digital works and for movie and video game companies, sending takedown requests to NFT platforms for his work became a daily routine before he eventually gave up. RJ Palmer designs creatures and monsters both for commissioned digital works and for movie and video game companies.

"There are simply way too many. It became a regular part of my day," Palmer explained, adding that he would continuously write emails in an effort to have NFTs removed from the internet. "This is putting a significant amount of strain on my shoulders. I don't want to deal with it because I don't want to."

The processes in place to verify that a purchaser is making a valid purchase of digital ownership have not been able to keep up with the expansion of the NFT art market. Criminals operating in anonymity take digital artwork off the internet, then try to pass it off as their own so they may make a profit off of it.

The quickly expanding digital markets that enable those purchases have not yet done much to halt that piracy, despite the fact that proponents of NFT pitch the technology as a method to fundamentally alter the ways in which people support the arts.