Hello, hello.Hello, hi everyone. Welcome to the second live session of the NFTs and the Metaversecourse offered by the University of Nicosia in partnership with Punk 6529 and the OM.I'm George Giaglis and before introducing our topic and our lecturers for today, I'd liketo take a couple of minutes to remind everyone of a few things related to the course logistics.First of all, as you all know, we are building the OM's Metacampus, so we should soon beable to migrate most of our future educational activities there. You should be able to seethe Metacampus building site on your right as you look at this screen, so hopefully thatdirection. After we finish today's session, I encourage everyone to make the short journeyto the portal to the Metacampus and visit it. You will just be able to see our first constructionthere, which is an open amphitheater, where we will probably be meeting for next week'slive session, but over the coming weeks we will be rolling out other places in the campusas well. So that's number one. Number two, please remember that this is an on-chain course,so we will be trying to touch upon centralized systems as little as possible. To this end,most of the educational material for the course will be made accessible to you in the formof NFTs. Those of you who had minted the course access token by last Friday should have alreadyreceived in your course wallet another NFT, this time an ERC 1155 token. Remember thethe discussion we had last week about standards. This token contains all the slides from lastweek's presentation. You should be able to view this NFT on marketplaces like OpenSeaor LuxRare, although you may need to try different browsers and settings to get it to work properlyfor you. For me, the best experience has been to view it in OpenSea using Firefox as a browser,as Chrome seems to be blocking its content by default, at least on my Mac. We're workingto make future drops easier to interact with, so if you have any ideas or comments aboutthat, as always, please drop us a note on Discord or Twitter or in the chat here. Numberthree, please note that all material regarding the course will be made available on our GitHubaccount, including our live sessions. The live sessions will also be available on YouTubefor those of you that cannot make the live session. Always monitor our Twitter account,this is the UNIC Metaverse account, for details on how to access this material on morecentralized, let's say, service providers. Number four, don't forget that you can usethe OM chat here to ask any questions you want to the lecturers that relate to today's session.Starting today, we will also be taking questions from Twitter. Just make sure that you either usethe NFTQnA hashtag when posting your question and or mention the UNIC Metaverse account sothat we can pick the question and feed it to the lecturers. The final thing, please note that in orderto manage the load on OM, we are splitting the class into rooms. Each room will have a maximumcapacity of 500 people. So please note that if you leave and reenter the OM during the livesession, you might find yourself in a different room with different classmates, different chathistory, etc. There's nothing to do on your side. I'm just noting this so that you're not confusedif you find yourself in another classroom suddenly. Also, please note that if you remain inactive for aperiod of time, your avatar doesn't move, you don't do anything in the chat or anything, OM willautomatically lock you out of multiplayer mode and you will find yourself alone in the Metaverseworld. So in that case, simply reload the page and re-enter in multiplayer to find your classmatesagain. Okay, now on to today's lecture. Today's session is about a very important, I would daresay fundamental aspect of NFTs and this is copyright, trademarks and licensing. Punk 6529hinted at the importance of this last week, but today we're going to do a deep dive in the subjectand explore its different dimensions. As the topic is highly specialized, this week I'm going to betaking a backstage role and I'm going to leave the floor to experts. So today's session will be apresentation and a live discussion between 6529 and our first guest in this course. So it is apleasure and an honor to present to you Ms. Eliana Torres. Let me read this so that I don't makeany mistake. Eliana is an attorney in the intellectual property group at Nixon Peabody LLP,where she's part of Nixon's blockchain Metaverse and IP teams. She focuses her practice ontechnology transactions, copyrights and trademarks, but she's also an avid collector of NFTs,where she has witnessed the many issues involving IP around them. Prior to joining Nixon,Eliana practiced as a trademark attorney for the United States Patent and Trademark Office,so I cannot think of a better person to discuss issues related to copyright in NFTs with 6529than Eliana. Before giving the floor to her, I would like to give the floor very briefly toSo the floor is yours. Thank you George and thank you everyone and great to be back here. I justwanted to note the following. I think copyright and trademark issues are among the most misunderstoodissues in NFTs, so I think this session is very important from a fundamental basis. I also thinkit is important to understand that Eliana is a lawyer, but at the end of the session you willnot be a lawyer, so this one session will not substitute for many years of law school andpracticing as a lawyer, so if you are someone who is active in the space, perhaps as a creator ora licensee or you're planning something significant to do with IP in the space, regardless of whatwe cover today, you should hire a relevant lawyer with relevant expertise to help you with whateveryou're going to do. I am not a lawyer, I am a civilian on this topic. I think I know much morethan most civilians and yet if I had a complicated issue of this type, I would also hire a lawyer.So what I hope we can accomplish today is Eliana will cover some of the basics in the first halfof the session, and then she and I will have a discussion on some of the more juicy spicy issuesthat exist right now in NFTs, and then we'll do the normal Q&A at then, so with that I'll hand itover to Eliana. First of all I want to say thank you for allowing me to be here to 6529 for George,everyone else that has helped made this happen, it's a historical moment for all of us, and with thatsaid I think we could get started with our lecture for today, and I think it's important for us tostart with some basics, so if we could get our agenda for today on the next slide please? So thisis where we are, this is our session two, and we'll have an agenda in the next slide. So we'll goover intellectual property, trademarks, copyrights, the transfer of copyrights, NFT licenses, and thenwe'll have the Q&A and conclusions with some further reading and some assignments for you guys.So starting with intellectual property, which is the next slide, well we already gave thisclaimer, so let's make sure that we all remember that, and there we go. So intellectual property,so I thought it would be useful for us to start with just the basics of what intellectual propertyis, and what it encompasses, and the major areas of law that touches on NFTs. So if we have thenext slide we'll have a breakdown of the major, the trifecta of intellectual property laws andintellectual property in the U.S., so we have the intellectual property definition, which isbasically you have creations of the mind, such as inventions, literary, artistic works, designs,symbols, names, and images using commerce, and they break down into three major areas. Patent forthe most part is not going to be as relevant today, so I'll leave it aside for the moment, butbasically it's inventions, and you'll have an exclusive right granted for an invention onceyou go to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and you'll have to go through this artist's processto actually get patent rights. At that point you'll be the inventor of that specific patent, butyou will have to go through that process in order for you to secure that right. That one won't beas relevant today, so we'll focus mostly on copyright and trademarks. So copyrights protectthe original work, and it subsists, so it is basically curated for the time that you put thatin paper or in any kind of medium that is tangible, and you are the author who become the, basicallythe owner of this copyright from that moment on. Trademark is an indicator of source, basically,so you have words, phrases, symbols, signs, or a combination, and they basically distinguish thesource of goods or services, so basically like the Nike switch that you see, you associate thatwith the source of being Nike for anything that has that specific symbol. So in the next slide,we'll start with trademarks. I think the most contentious issues revolve around copyright,so that trademarks, we could go briefly over what a trademark is and how to acquire this right,and then we'll go into the more substantive issues of copyright. So starting with trademarks,in the next slide, we have the definition of a trademark, so you have basically get an exclusiveright to use a mark in connection with some goods or services, and you get to protect that frominfringement on dilution, so from anyone using this mark in association with similar goods orservices. You basically have this right in perpetuity, so as long as you continue to renew itand continue to use this right in commerce, so in whatever it is that you decide to use in associationwith your goods or services, as long as you continue using that in commerce, and you continuouslyrenew it with the trademark office, if you do have a registration, then that continues to exist.So basically, you have goods and services that you use, whatever it is you're using,whether a symbol, marker, or a wording, or a combination in commerce, and that is associatedwith specific classes that are considered basically just the categories in which you are using thatmark in association with. That's how the USPTO classifies them in NFTs, and we'll see this later,the specific guidance as to where you should place these classes or how you should describethese goods and services according to the USPTO, but I'll go into that in a little bit later. Sothe next slide, please. So we have a lot of NFTs projects that have trademarked their names ortheir brands or in association to anything that they've created. In 2021, actually, there wereabout just a handful of trademarks, maybe 100 or so, and this year, there's been an influx oftrademarks just related to a metaverse NFTs. So we've seen a huge rise in trademark applicationsthat have been filed for specific classes related to NFTs. These classes, as I mentioned, categoriestend to be class 9 and 42 and some 35. So again, not to confuse you guys, these are just numbersthat kind of indicate some categories basically, and the majority of those are in class 9 becausethey are considered by the USPTO as downloadable goods that are associated with an underlyingasset. So you still have to define what that asset is. So similarly, how we have what wasmentioned in the previous class, which you have the token and you purchase a token, not necessarilyone that you buy the token and the asset together, but the token relates or points or links back tothe underlying asset. Similarly, USPTO is using that same kind of definition to categorize thistrademark registrations. So most of them will be in class 9, all of them for the most part. If youhave a known downloadable asset or token that links back to something else, you further definewhat that something else is basically, but it will remain in class 9 as a downloadable assetbasically. So Fedenza actually has a trademark for Fidenza. Then you have cryptopunks and a lotof these are still in the stages of examination. So they'll go through a process of examinationbefore getting to the registration from right now. There's a backload since we have so manytrademarks for this specific classes of goods, and they are taking about 9 to 10 months toexamine this. So we'll see what happens with this trademark applications. There are notregistrations yet, some of them. Next slide please. So you actually don't need to register yourtrademark, but it is highly encouraged. So what that means is once you start using something incommerce, you basically have a trademark by Commonwealth. So you start using that in commerce,whatever that is that you use, it is highly recommended for you to have a registration,and you have to show that you're using that in commerce. And that is to show that consumersare identifying your product or service with that specific trademark. So the reason why wenormally advise to have a registration is because you get the ability to enforce your trademarkrights, and it is highly advisable just because your rights are limited under common law if youdon't have that registration. And in order for you to bring that lawsuit, you have that registrationand it's kind of proof that you actually have been using that in commerce across the UnitedStates. So having said that, there are some protections that the trademark does not extend tobasically, or they're commonly known as fair use, and they relate to two specific ones. So we haveclassic and nominative fair use, and these are basically just acceptance. I don't want to callit exceptions, but they just, trademark rights would not extend to this basically. So classic fairuse is when someone uses a trademark and is used to describe goods or services. So basicallyyou're not using it to indicate source for whatever you are selling, but you're only using that othertrademark, someone else's rights to describe your specific goods. So for example, you're using it todescribe a service. So you're using a trademark for, I don't know, Apple to describe that you offertechnical services. And you say, you know, we service computers from Apple to Samsung, you'renot using that to indicate the source of your services and being Apple and Samsung, you'rebasically using that to reference to your own services. Similarly, we have nominative use,and you are using it, there's been some case law around nominative use and how much of it you'reallowed to use someone else's mark in order to describe something else basically. And it couldbe really complex, which is why I kind of just want to breeze over it. This is going to come upmostly in some of the case law that we have right now, or not even precedent yet, but some of thecases that have been brought in NFT related cases against some infringement that has goneon in the space. So common situations where you would use how fair use will be news reporting,commentary, product review, parity, and some comparative advertising. So when you are usingit basically to make fun of or not make fun of it, create some sort of common relief around aspecific issue and you use somebody else's trademark. That's basically what that wouldentail, but there's some very specific guidelines as to how you go through the definition of fairuse and where that actually is fair use in relation to all these situations. And hopefullyas not too complex. But next slide, please. So again, this is why I wanted to kind ofleave the fair use arguments for this, and this is because we have some trademark infringementcases right now. Most of them are surrounding the creation of NFTs that represents some physicalitems. So like that's basically Hermes and Mason Rothschild. So in Metaberkin's case,that we'll come to know. In that case, and I think the majority of us have heard of it,there was an NFT that was created that resembled the Metaberkin's bags, which arequite famous and very expensive. And this designation or this NFT basically was quoteunquote commentary on the use of specific, it was a political commentary according to the creator.However, if he made a significant amount of money, so they had Hermes International soon,this creator, and we are still waiting for a decision. The last thing we heard was thatan injunction was that a motion to dismiss actually was failed. So it was rejected. Sothe loss is going to continue. And I think this case is going to be very important because it'sgoing to define whether you have, if you have a trademark for a specific good that is physical.So like the Medaverkin's trade dress and the actual trademark of the Birkin's bags,whether those are too, you can conflate those basically. So whether you could have an infringementbecause someone else is creating that in a digital form in an NFT. So this is going to determinethe extent or the scope of the protection of the current registrations for existing brands.And then we have the Nike StockX. And this is a little bit different in that,and I find this one particularly interesting because Nike in StockX are, again,StockX is a reseller of goods and they are using NFTs in association with the shoes thatthey resell. So most of the arguments are kind of surrounding the argument or the analogy thatis a receipt. So you're basically authenticating actual goods that you can then later on redeemas the shoe themselves or they're associated to the shoes. The shoes are Nike's shoes,essentially, in StockX because they're reseller. So this one's particularly interesting becauseit brings a lot of kind of doctrines that we have not determined whether they're applicableto the NFT space, such as the first sale doctrine and this first sale doctrine basically,and I don't want to go into a rabbit hole, but you basically have the ability to sellsomething once you purchase it. So once I buy a painting, I have the right to sell that.And that would be like basically what some of the arguments that they're making in this case,but these are all trademark related cases that we have yet to resolve. So we'll have the nextslide before I go in the rabbit hole and know the descriptions of the cases. So now we enterinto copyright, and this is particularly applicable to the NFT space. We'll go into the next slide,please. Copyright creation is basically once you put something in a tangible medium. So if I writesomething in a piece of paper and that's already a tangible and there's enough originality,that's enough for me to have a copyright. And that's differentiated from a copyright,from a copyright registration. They're separate. So when I say copyright, it's just basically youown that copyright, that creation that you made. If you go through a registration process, we'lltalk about that later, but it's separate. So you own your copyright, that does not mean youhave a copyright registration. So right now, the laws recently changed from the Copyright Act inhow long it will be protected for. And you get with a copyright, you get a bundle of sticks or abundle of rights that we commonly recognize as this six basic rights that you have the right toreproduce, prepare derivative work, distribute, perform, display, transmit. So with a copyright,you get the right to kind of control this, this the ability to any of those things and excludeanyone from doing any of those things. Next slide, please. So now in the reason why I'm going sofast is because we're going to enter into a really kind of interesting points about all of theseissues. One of the issues in copyright is the originality and the fixation. So these are requirementsfor you to have a copyright. The originality is basically a minimum degree of creativity. Andthat's argued in not to get very, I guess, into a new nuances of the entity space. But generativeworks are arguably all of them have the end of creativity, but someone may argue they do not.So then we go into the authorship, which is partly the same argument I just made earlier about theminimum degree of creativity, because if you use an AI system, for example, AI like Dali or any AIplatform or coding or anything else that kind of creates the work for you, you still would need thatlevel of creativity. And it's a although it's a low standard, you still will be questioned by thecopyright office about how you use the system and whether that is enough to have a, I guess,personhood or human creativity by the human. Because otherwise, you will not be entitled tothat registration. But the originality comes up often in the infringement cases and thatregistration process. So those are the two times that you'll see this coming to question.And then the last thing we need is the fixation. So you'll have the tangible medium of expressionand whether that's sufficient. And you just need the minimal degree of creativity. Again,that's kind of reemphasized there. We'll go into the next slide, please. And this is where it getsfun. You have the human authorship requirement and the definition of author is not in the copyrightact. But they have clearly distinguished and established that you need a human creationcomponent. And this was established mostly by Supreme Court in this case, where they determinedthat human authorship was essential to copyright protection. And then it was reemphasized by thecopyright office in the compendium, where they mentioned that a work must be created by a humanbeing. And then it was reemphasized in this really fun case where a monkey basically grabbedsomeone else's camera and took some selfies. And then the copyright office did not grantthe registration because they said the animal basically was not a human and could not get thiscopyright registration. And that is the actual selfie of the monkey. Next one, please.So by default, the creator owns the copyright at the moment of fixation. Again, this is differentfrom the registration. And the physical work is not the same thing as ownership in that copyright.So if I buy a painting by Botero, this Colombian artist, I could get the physical copy, but thatdoes not mean that I could start then using that same painting to distribute in advertisingor putting in a movie or use it for other purposes that are commercial or even non-commercial. Sounless they're following the fair use. But you purchase this painting, you do not get the copyrightand we'll see how that's similar to NFT space coming up. We'll go into the next slide, please.Again, this is a kind of expanded definition of the human authorship requirements. Recently,the copyright board dealt with a case by Dr. Thaler, where he tried to copyright a paintingor a work of art rather, I'm sorry, and he was called the entrance to paradise. And this work ofart was created by a machine that he coded called creative machine. And the problem here was thathe named the author the creative machine. So the author was the AI system itself.He didn't name himself as the author, he named himself as the owner. So the output of this machineand the author was the creative machine. So that is when it became an issue for the copyrightoffice and they decided not to grant this registration. And this was later on appealed andhe still lost it against the board and then he filed lawsuits in DC. And we'll see how thatturns out. But I think for the last we have heard of this is that they're not going to granthim this registration because you have to have the level of authorship that human being as a creator.This is different and I want to emphasize this because I have seen this in the space latelywhere we read from some articles that there was a copyright registration issued for a comic strip,I think was a comic strip where the AI machine was used. And that was different because theauthor was not named as the AI machine and they copyright office did question the level ofcreativity or the level of work from the human. Yeah, you could go to the next one. I think I'mtaking a little long so we'll go really quick on that over the next slide. These are the notprotected things under copyright. Basically you have also fair use similar to to what we mentionedfor trademarks. And if you want to go to the next slide we'll go into this a little bit faster sowe can get to the fun stuff. Ideas, procedures, processes and systems. So basically anythingthat's factual it would not be protected on the copyright just doesn't have enough level of creativityfor the most part that there will be one of the questions that you have when determining whetherthat is fair use. And then both the main works so disclaiming any kind of works under CCO whichwill also will co-relator are also not protected on the copyright once you kind of disclaim thoserights. So basically you give up or you waive all your rights to the creation that you made.We could go on to the next slide so we'll move a little faster. Again this is a copyrightdoctrine of fair use. And it's an affirmative defense and you have this four-part test thatI alluded to earlier. And these are four of the queries that the courts will look at whendetermining whether a work was fair use and that should not be protected on the copyright,therefore potentially no infringement. So they would use this and a case by case determination.These are not exclusive to or not the spotters that you don't have to have. You could have alittle bit more on one of these factors than the others and the courts are kind of there's nono bright area. There's no black and white. It's kind of a gray area where they lean on thisfour-part test. And normally this is used as an affirmative defense and we could go on to the nextslide. So this part I and I included this slide because I think it's important for us in thisspace to understand a little bit of what works for hire are in the copyright context becausea lot of the projects right now that I've seen they contract out the creation of the work. Sothey'll have a third party create the art or the music or the video for the NFT projects. So theseare commonly known as works for hire and they come into specific situations. So one would beas an employee. So you create this work of whatever it is that you created for your employer,then essentially your employer is the owner and the creator legally the creator of the of the workand you give up basically your rights to that owner to that employer. And then the secondsituation in which this comes about will be in this nine categories and unwriting agreement. Soyou have a work for hire agreement basically and you would basically give up their rightsto that creation to the person who hired you. And these are usually commission works. Soone of those works will have to fall into this nine categories. And then if none of these takesplace you would basically enter into an agreement with whoever hired you or whoever you hired andyou will have an assignment. And we'll have a little bit more expanded definitions of what anassignment is in the next few slides. But for the most part they serve work for hire situationsand they're very two specific situations in which this comes about. We'll have the next slide please.This is also important in the space because creators often do this the works or do thecreations as joint authors. So as a team and this is basically works that are prepared bytwo or more people. So authors, but they have to have that intention that the contributions beone. So merge into inseparable parts or independent parts. So by unitary whole and the act is veryspecific about what a joint work is. They would both have an undivided interest in the entiretyof the copyright and they can exploit the work on a non-exclusive basis without the permissionof the other. So basically they could have that non-exclusive use as long as they takeaccount of the other person and they give them their fair share of profits if they are exploitingthat. And as long as they don't harm the actual work. This is also important for any creators outthere in the entity space that are creating works with more than one person making sure that youguys have an agreement in place where this is kind of clear as to what you're allowed and notallowed to do as a joint author and there's an understanding of what that means. We'll go tothe next slide please. So we'll go into the registration process which I mentioned earlier.The registration does not affect the nature of your copyright but it does affect your abilityto enforce these rights. Your rights will be limited. You will not be able to bring the federalcourt lawsuits unless you have this registration or a registration rejection. So there's alsothis is not often mentioned but if you did not get a registration from the copyright office youcould still bring lawsuits and you have to argue that you should have gotten the registration soas part of there will be part of your argument but for the most part and just to for simplicityyou do need a registration to bring a lawsuit in the federal court system and get to enforce yourrights and that's to stop someone from infringing on your copyright and this is also an example ofwhat the copyright registration would look like. Fidenza which I mentioned earlier has a trademarkregistration but they also have a copyright registration which is really interesting to me.They have copyright registration on individual fidenzas and I've looked at how many they have.I don't remember the exact number but they this one's fidenza number 56 they actually number themand they have individual they didn't copyright them as a collection of works but they copyrighteach one of these individually which is very interesting. We'll go into the next slide.So we'll get into it more of a guess debated discussion of what the transfersin copyrights entail since they apply pretty heavily to the NFT space. We'll go into the nextslide please. So this is according to section one of the act it transfers an assignment mortgageexclusive license or any other conveyance of a copyright or any exclusive rights comprisedin a copyright but not including non-exclusive license and I know it sounds like a mouthfulbut just to make it into an analogy that's understandable is basically as if I sell youmy house if I sell you my house you have full rights and you have all the rights to that houseand that is different from me giving you a non-exclusive license which is the analogy is Ilet you stay at my house and you could use my house for as long as I tell you that you could usemy house and you maybe I could tell you that you can only go in the kitchen or I could youcan only go in the room so I determine what kind of rights I give you with that not non-exclusivityand by the non-exclusivity part I mean that I could also let my brother come into the house orsomeone else come into the house so that's the difference between the full transfer so it doesan assignment and a non-exclusive license. The next slide please. This is more for visual I thinkthis is pretty kind of a simple way to kind of understand this transfers so you have the copyrightand you transfer all the rights so this is again kind of similar to selling the whole house so Igive you title to all and rights to the entire house I can't just come back to you later and sayyou know give me back my house that's basically what this means I have to give you this right inwriting and I have to sign it um then you get all the same rights that you that I would get as if youwere the owner from conception and you then we go into the next one so that's the license and thenoh the previous one sorry yeah we'll go into the next bucket for a previous slide please yeahso license then we have um the exclusive or the non-exclusive for the exclusive partit's very similar to an assignment right except you also need it in writing you I will also haveto give these rights to you by signature and I have to sign them away to you and you only get thisrights uh it's an exclusive user so I can't give these rights to anyone else that is different froma non-exclusive so you wouldn't be special in other words to get these rights to uh in the analogyto borrow my house or to go into my house and this could be oral or implied also and we'll go intothe definitions of those uh in the next slide now the next slide please thank you um so there's a lotof issues with the license in the entity space uh because I don't think we have a pretty clearunderstanding of what the law is surrounding or surrounding these licenses so exclusive licensesactually terminate at the earlier of one of those two years so 35 years from a date of publicationor 40 years from the time that you grant these rights um and the time of publication it again thisthis may seem like uh it doesn't make it makes no sense but you could have a copyright registrationin unpublished works so um you may be able to have rights that you granted prior to publicationso that's how that would make sense so we also have the non-exclusive licenses so these are alsobut you could have it in writing or verbally give these licenses for the most part they'rewriting and they have a variety of termination procedures and that will be explained in theactual licensing and license agreement that you grant and then you have an implied non-exclusivelicense that could be terminable at will so whenever the person that granted them decidesand that is there's an exception to this and if you have an implied non-exclusive licenseand this comes about in projects where there was no grant or so no mention of what kind of licenseyou got and you got an implied quote unquote license and um then it could be argued thatyou paid consideration that was enough for the license to not be revocable otherwise it wouldbe revocable so like if you see the terms of use where it says you know this could be revokedat any time basically that's what that means but for the implied one where there is no writing nomention of what you actually received when it was just implied based on conduct or you using thelicense and them allowing it if you had enough consideration the court will look at this considerationas enough uh sort of like detrimental reliance so you relied on the what you've been using thislicense for and then it becomes irrevocable, so there are some exceptions that I think will beimportant to note and and I know it's just kind of a very dense area of law so and I'm probably goingreally fast but just important to for us to note that there are exceptions to determination and thoseare transfers by will so by uh testament one someone passes away by works for hire the worksmade for hire because essentially your the creator is the the creator is not the owner anymorebut the employer or whoever hired at that point he has those right now and then the grants byother federal laws so for example like you have at a batman that had that was granted a licenseto someone else in that batman use so like the actual character also had some trademarks in itso if there were trademarks embedded into the use of that copyright then you can't terminatethat because then you know what will happen to those trademarks that were also granted underthat specific license so that's when that really often happens and then also under foreign lawswhich we will not go into but that's also another exception worth noting and then we'll go intoderivative works and you have the authority to continue using the whatever you created so itbasically works like a layer so anything that you prepare under the grant or so under whateverlicense you receive before the termination you continue to utilize that so like the layer solike once you have that whatever you built upon it you can continue to use after the terminationbut it doesn't extend to any rights after the termination so you cannot continue to continueto create more works based on the first layer that you initially received once it is terminatedwe'll go into the next slide please then we get to the uh the fund part and this is theNFT licenses and i think for this part point 65 tonight it's going to join me because i thinkwe'll get into more of the very uh dicey discussions in this areaso we could go into the next slide all right hello hello hello could you hear meokay loud and clear well first of all thank you so much for that i know for everyone this wasprobably a lot to absorb if this is not something that you've thought about in detail before infact even for me when i was looking at the materials and i think i know a decent amountabout this topic there were things i had to ask clarifying questions uh i had to read the slidesa few times the good thing is the slides are going to be available uh we will be availablein the chat we'll be available on Twitter and so we'll be able to follow up on these thingsi would also say i think we're just going to have to run over of the one hour i mean i don'tthink we'll be done in the next 15 minutes we're just getting to the juicy parts i hope all ofyou can stay if you can't it's okay it'll be recorded you can watch the rest of it laterbut i don't want to cut it short because i think we have a lot of fun things to discusslet me put some things in my words from a more NFT perspectiveand only if i get anything wrong you should interrupt me and then we'll see where thereally pressure points are i think this is a good slide here this slide 29 and on the slidethat we're on let's go back the base model when you buy an nft is exactly the same as if you buya traditional piece of art and i see this being an area of endless confusion particularly bynon-NFT people right like they say oh well what rights do you have or your rights are unclearor here are all these like extremely nuanced topics about what rights you might have to the IPbut of course off-chain pre-NFTs your default expectation if you bought a painting if youbought a book if you bought a cd if you bought a movie if you bought any piece of art or mediumthe default expectation is that you get no rights whatsoever you have a right to personal usethe copyright stays with the owner so if you know i famously bought an Andy Warhol tomato soup candoes not mean i am now the copyright owner of Andy Warhol soup cans and i'm going to maket-shirts and pillows and posters the Andy Warhol estate owns the copyrights there you know ifyou bought a Harry Potter book it does not mean you now own the Harry Potter franchise right youhave a license you can read it yourself and most NFTs in the generative art world in the one of oneworld are sold under this model right your default expectation is if you have not heard otherwiseif there's not been something communicated otherwise if there's not terms and conditionsotherwise what you should expect you have is the right to that particular instance for your personaluse but no the IP of the creator has not been transferred to you so your default is exactlythe same and all of the interesting topics all of the ones where i think people are confused andwe're leaving seeing some challenging legal issues as the law is not yet adapted to an on-chain worldis where nft creators have tried to give more rights right things that you wouldn't actuallytypically see off-chain and let's take a look at some of those let's go to the next pageoh yeah i guess i should address this before we get to that you know i think related to thisand i've spent a lot of time with this oddly i've spent time on this topic even with peoplewho are crypto native and they say well i mean sure you have the token but the jpeg as we sawlast week might be on ipfs or our Arwave on a server and i can download it all by myselfand of course the correct answer this is so what you can download i can go download the google logoall by myself i can right click save as the google logo and then the google logo is on my desktopand that means quite literally absolutely nothing right it does not make me the owner of the googlelogo it does not make me the owner of google uh Larry and Sergi are not trembling in their seatsthat i've right click saved their logo it means absolutely nothing right and this is the correctthe actual practical correct analysis so i could say why does it doesn't mean anything i meanstrictly speaking if i started using the google logo i'm probably violating someone's copy rightso strictly speaking i might be breaking the law right but even that practically speaking it justdoesn't matter and in an on-chain world where you know this was very common last year people woulddownload punk 6529 and tweet at me and say i have punk 6529 now okay that's great i mean the tokensin my wallet you have a jpeg um it's clear who owns punk 6529 and if there's any doubt about thistry and sell the jpeg right the market value for the right click saved as jpeg is zero soi want to address and i'm guessing half the audience three quarters of the audiencehas already passed us but we might have some new people in the audience new people to nftsit's a common stumbling block to people new in the space but it truly genuinely in my opinionand ellie if you have a different view we share it i just think it means literally absolutelynothing it's a non-issue agreed yeah okay let me skip this because it'sactually fairly technical and we can come back and discuss this if we need to keep goingokay let me let's talk about the punks because i think this is super super interesting andlet's think about the two main frameworks that are might be different than the traditionalframework are where people are trying to grant commercial rights along with the tokenor where people are saying we're putting the work in the public domain quote unquote cc0we'll come to that in the next section let's talk about commercial rights because in some waysthis is the one that's most legally complicated you know the traditional model is not legallycomplicated the public domain model is actually not legally complicated it's well understoodit's the licensing model that is legally complicated and the reason we have thecrypto punks license here is that over the commercial licensing licenses i think it'sthe most well thought out it's the most complete uh you go clearly put a lot of work into it iscertainly much more thought out than the board apes license and the mutant apes license whichyou know board apes license a couple paragraphs long and it's not totally clear what it's tryingto say whereas the crypto punks license is clear what it says is if you have a crypto punks tokenyou can commercially exploit your punk not of course anyone else's punk not any of theunderlying elements in your punk right my punk has a hoodie i can't take a punk-style hoodieand exploit that individually i have to exploit punk 6529 specifically you can create derivativeworks you can have sub licensees you can even apply for a trademark for your punk not of courseyou can't use the general Yuga trademarks for crypto punks so it is as permissive as you can getfor the actual owner of the token let's say that's bucket one bucket two there's been some thoughtinto what happens if you sell the token further and what they say is if you've sub licensedor you've made derivatives and then you sell the token to the next person everything that you havedone today holds but you can't do new things right so let's say i've made 10 000 little 6529 punksand then i sell my punk to Ellie i can still like sell off my inventory of little 6529 punks but ican't make a new derivative there's also some uh well let me stop there this is all this is tome all of the good news right now there's a couple of bad news from the perspective ofyou're fully crypto native you want to live on a blockchain right you know what's what's the badnews well the bad news here and i understand why it's there is since it's a license since you havean ongoing relationship with Yuga you see yuga like any kind of normal big American companythen puts things in there like but we can terminate the license or you're not allowed to do certainthings hate speech or trading with sanctioned entities or what have you say well why would youwant to do anyway noone's going to do that deliberately right and into some level i believeit's Yuga covering their butts because you know they they don't want to indirectly be in businesswith a sanctioned entity but it's also moving a variety of obligations on a token holderbut they don't have in if you own a bitcoin or an ether right it's not your bitcoin or ether can'tbe taken away if you use bitcoin to engage in speech that is not permissible in your countryright but theoretically your license to your punk could be uh theoretically and it's different thanyou know certain applications that use bitcoin or ether have been sanctioned like tornado cashright but the protocol itself is not really sanctioned here if the protocol is the token it isis through the license there is a counterparty risk a centralization risk right that's i would saythat's bucket one bucket two which i get i understand why it's there the license has ageneral term there says it can be changed i know why it's there because it's a brand new spaceand the laws might change and they might need to adapt the license to new laws so it's a sensibleand logical thing to do and i have every view that Yuga has good faith here and their generalmodel is to assign the commercial rights to the users but strictly speaking the licensedoesn't can change to mark change and say something different than what it says there and then thethird thing that this was something i learned through the preparation of this of this sessionand this i want to ask Ellie if i understood it right i might have gotten it wrong in which caseit'll be good to be corrected i had previously known to transferring a copyrightrequired a written agreement and there's a whole bunch of consternation of if ayou know on-chain transaction is a written agreement right of course as an intestine it'sprobably not um but then what i saw is that an exclusive license also requires a written agreementto be transferred and i think this license is primarily an exclusive license as it relatesto 6529 it's not no it's it's non-exclusive it it will be a non-exclusive licensewhy would that be so do you want to go back to the i think they do mention that at some pointin the terms that it's a non-exclusive worldwide license it's not exclusive um otherwise it wouldliterally say it this is an exclusive license so basically just one part you as a person wouldget it and if i'm not mistaken i know we had one side where you had like the full termsbut it says it's a non-exclusive um license but that one yeah it would have to be in writing as welland i guess going back to your point i this has not been tested in court yet but there are somearguments that you can make that some licenses maybe when you guys intentionally say that youknow i give you all rights i give you a commercial rights but then it gives you all this other kindof like as long as you buy to this and kind of alludes to a it is a license instead of just anassignment on rights um and it hasn't been tested in court whether you just transferring the tokenitself in connection to this license it's it's enough to have a cryptographic signature thatis in writing enough for you to have agreed upon this but again none of this has been tested inthis kind of it's it's a second issue that will deal with the subsequent buyer with thateven that license the initial license is even enforceable against the the next buyer theso person a and person b so whether you could enforce that gets the person b but going backto your point yeah i think that um it is a non-exclusive license and so i i pulled it up it'sactually very funny so they say it's exclusive and they also say this is the funny part isuniverse wide i don't know how that jurisdiction works universe wide so it says yeah an exclusiveuniverse wide royalty free something some license of a license to reproduce a shipmentprepared derivative works publicly display publicly perform transmit and otherwise exploityour cryptopunk art is that the most reason one the previous one may have uh i know that they havefor example like not you got that state non-exclusive in this one i don't know if youi'll pull it up too i know we have the link there but if it's exclusive it has to be writing so umthat would imply that you had that this will be sufficient enough and normally you have like toascend something so like you have to click that you do agree to this right um that was sufficientwriting um but that would imply that during the minting process you would have had to agreeand then this goes back to many issues that have not been tested because this this was uh again thiswas amended so we don't even know if this could be enforceable or there could be an argument thatit's not enforceable against it the people who bought in post amendments so this has not beentested yet in court there's no precedent for this one yet right so and i think this goes to a veryinteresting point like regardless of what it specifically says right and the Bored Apeslicense for sure was trying to transfer the copy copyright right and here are things as far as ican tell have not been tested or it's unclear. Number one) if you are a secondary buyer which could be ona normal marketplace or an exchange or in some type of smart contract or even peer to peerare you bound by the license and how right and you've never actually accepted that licensethat's number one. Number two) if someone is trying to transfer copyright or an exclusive licenseeven if you have a terms and conditions at the bottom does this qualify as a written agreementNumber three) the marketplace terms the support i wanted to skip over before because i think it's verycomplicated the marketplace terms tend to be generic right so most of the volume happens inopen sea right on open not for punks but for everything else open sea has fairly genericterms it does not pass through the terms of every single collection and so to the degree you'reclick accepting something an open sea you're accepting the generic open sea terms not thecollection specific terms and so arguably all of this stuff is open to interpretation challengeor it applies in the first place right and i think some of the people who are negative on this arelike well it's it's bad but i'll give you my counter argument here and this is again i'd loveyour view on this and one is a practical one one another one is a future one a practical onelet's say it doesn't apply right but Yuga intends genuinely i'm a hundred percentcertain of this it wants its community to do projects with their IP that's the whole pointof things right they're trying to get 10 000 people working to promote the collection asopposed to just a centralized team so to the degree that the buyer more or less acts like itsapplies and the seller or the issuer acts like it supplies doesn't matter i mean like if who's going towho if generally your concern would be as a buyer of one of these things that the issuerwill enforce against you so i don't want you using your punk this way right i don't want youmaking pillows pillowcases with your punk but yuga very clearly does want you to make pillowcaseswith your punk or beer with your punk or coffee brands with your punk that's exactly what theywant you to do right and so since they want you to do it where would the practical risks comethat's that's question one and then question two is maybe what will happen is in time andi don't think it's imminent but maybe in the next three to five years we will have legislationto cover topics like this and the analogy that comes to mind for me is there used to be thisdebate in the 90s about electronic transactions and how can electronic transactions ever be validbecause you have to sign with a pen and you can't sign with a pen on the internet right there's alot of things that used to say you have to sign with a pen and then i think it was in 1996 theunited states passed the e-signature act and the e-signature act in one stroke said well all thoseelectronic transactions are fine they count exactly as much as if they were signed with a penand this enabled a whole swath of e-commerce to come to life and you know this has been absolutelyfine that's why we have e-commerce today and then i so i wondered even if there are issuesnow in this kind of teething period if eventually you know the legislation will change it wasinteresting that copyright office decision on the ai art you could tell they were uncomfortablewith the decision they were making right they were just saying look we don't have the rightto assign copyright to an ai this is congress's job to fix right like if like if congress wantsto do this they should fix it and then we're happy to do it you could tell them they didn't feelcomfortable saying all this work's not copyrightable we have to follow the letter of the law and theletter of the law says there needs to be human and if they want to cover you know human slash machinepartnerships they should change the law and so what are your views on this like what's the practicalrisk today that even if this license is not a hundred percent correct enforceable etc whatpractical risk might a punk holder a board abe holder have and you know can you imagine thelaw changing in the future so i think that these are all unaddressed questions that i don't knowthat i don't know anyone that have the answers to i think the most important thing to know is thatbecause this is so new I think that legally we need some changes but i also thinktechnologically we need some changes and i say that because if you were able to transfer the tokenwith a license that was available and that required someone to accept the license uponeach transfer and this was abided by all platforms we would solve a lot of issues with that becausethen people would have the privity of contract with each one each transaction so i think thatis not just legal but also technologically we need to mature and as far as risk goes i i thinkuntil we see some more kind of issues with this space we we don't know i would say this is alitigious question as far as who would want to bring any sort of issues regarding this licensesand their enforceability that would be the risk is is why would anyone want to contest this andagain i think most of the issues that i have in this space is not just legal questionsbut that technological feature and then some of the misunderstandings as far as the amendmentgoes so like what how do we know which license applies if this is amendable at any point solike let's say that they're amended multiple times they say let's say Yuga lab decides to amend itthree four five times upon this and in the next five years so then at what point do we know whichlicense apply to whom and was there any privity of contract to say okay this license number threeapply to buyer five or buyer six or buyer six hundred um so yeah i would say um that technologicallywe could fix this and then uh the law would definitely have to evolve with that technologyamazing i i guess well they'll have to update the license on-chain so then you can seewhich license applies to which to which to which user right yeah i mean yeah and and i think thattechnologically we could solve a lot of things and if we if we if only the platforms would kind oflike uh accept some of the smart contracts i know some some companies that are like trying to orsome platforms that are trying to kind of have this where like you upon each transfer you'regonna have to click yes and be able to like read it so kind of like when we go on websites right nowand accept the terms of use um so each buyer will have an actual understanding what they'repurchasing and whether there's any encumbrances or liens or any sub-licensed um rights that havebeen passed to a different person i think that technologically we could solve the legalissues too. Oh I love what you were just describing i mean this would let me put it back in mywords that technologically we could bring the terms and conditions and the sub-licenses andchanges of these and things that were created under the sub-licenses and so on-chain and atthat point you can contract around the number one but it only gets me excited and you canprogrammatically access them right and because right now i do feel this all the commercialrights type projects do have a foot in both worlds right you have this global instantdigitally native permissionless token flying around everywhere and then for it to work this contractthat literally on the cryptopunks site is a pdf right and so you're saying maybe we can developbetter technology to bring the pdf side into the programmatic side i think so because right now wehave three three kind of different layers and it's kind of like a sandwich where like you have likeand it should not be it should not be for the legal perspective so like you're basically sayingi sell you this house but someone else is hosting whatever rights i have and and that that's somethat's somewhere else is normally like an aws or at the best an ipfs that holds those rightswhich is the terms of use that i'm mentioning so that should not live separate from the tokenand and if those were hand in hand together just like even we had just two layers where like thetoken itself has the rights but also the metadata was i think again i think the technology is tomature so that people could really readily like read that and be able to understand it becauseright now who's going to go into the ether scan and go through the metadata and and click on linksor be able to know where to go in the metadata to click on the link that kind of takes you to theto the terms of use like it's a lot of steps that i don't think people are going to if a judge saw itthey may see you know there was no actual understanding or knowledge or a sense um throughthe terms of use because nobody's going to go through this metadata processthat makes perfect sense okay let's go to cc0 and public domain let's skip forward a few slidesand go to the next slide actually okay my sense of where we have ended up today inso-called cc0 so creative commons zero which is a form of license that tries as much as possibleto put the copyrights in the public domain and the reason i say as much as possible in somecountries there are certain rights that you cannot put in the public domain if you want to butfor an american person i think you can generally you can put all your rights in the public domaini believe it's an alternative way to solve some of the issues we just spoke about i think that'show people are thinking of them let me give you my sense so because i've spoken to a lot of thefolks who have done this right and their assessment of the solution is not, okay we have to agree ona standardized format for legal contracts in terms and conditions and we'll bring them onchains to coordinate all the exchanges and do all these things their view is all different they sayokay well that sounds like an awful lot of work let's take a completely different approach firstof all let's take the approach that encourages maximum virality right the attention driveseverything online and if it is the case that having 10 000 people working on your furtherdeveloping your ip is better than having the 10 people in your marketing team working on your ipwell it's even better to let the 2.3 billion people online further develop your ip and your ipwill become more famous and important to get more attention if anyone can work on it sothat's one theory i think the second theory is even if someone let's say you 6529 have therights to punk 6529 and let's say you had a kind of strict view of how only you wanted toto develop it and if someone else started doing things with your punk you should chase them aroundand legally i think part of saying like look this is chasing people around legally onlinein 99.999 of cases it's not worth the effort anyway right like i mean it's people copy things all thetime online and mostly you don't bother chasing them around and say like look it's it's effectivelyit might be legally enforceable but it might be practically not hugely enforceable so idon't want to have to even think about that let's say point number two point number three ofthis this was x copies point that any version of trying to do it through a licensing agreementis going to lead to centralization there is always going to be a counterparty the counterparty isalways going to want things like oh i need the right to change this agreement for logical reasonsthe laws might change and they might be required to change the agreement but nonetheless it's neverthe content the art is never really free because there's always a counterparty and a counterpartythat in some ways has more power than you do right like that they can change the contract you can'tright and so and then the biggest all these issues on is it enforceable is it not enforceable is itwritten transfer did it happen through an exchange did not happen through an exchange was it on mintwhich version applies take all away right you don't have to think about it's a huge simplificationyou don't have to worry about them at all right there's who can i own some public domain pfp somemfers for example and i don't have to think about these issues at all because it's clear who canuse that art anyone right absolutely anyone the product of user i can also use it but so can anyoneelse so it simplifies and then i think what underlies all this all of this is the ideathat i'm stealing now from punk 4156 and i think in a few days we'll have him on here on thecourse and so we'll really dig into this then he said something a long time ago that i found veryinteresting was the right mental model here is provenance not copyright and how i understood itis the following pre nfts let's say you had a really nice image and then it starts gettingcopied which happens all the time right you see an example here with cats some art happens all thetime someone posts a beautiful photo on Instagram and then like 5 000 people copyright they postedthemselves they don't attribute it and now you don't know which one's the original becauseeveryone's supposed to get everywhere this doesn't really apply in NFTs right like theprovenance of who actually minted it who owns it who the artist said owns it what who the artistrecognizes as the owner it's super clear it's the person with the token to the degree that there'sa person with a token then everyone else that's running around with the art is in a way someform of right click saving us right now or to think of it a more positive light is driving value backto the token holder right they're creating attention but they're still only one original yesthey can use it but there's only one original now here we're in completely simultaneouslycompletely untested waters and extremely tested waters why do i say extremely tested watersthe vast you open an art history book the vast majority of art in an art history book anythingbefore 1924 is that the right state is in the public domain so it's not like this is somethingbrand new to the world you know any Van Gogh is in the public domain right uh books from the 18thcentury in the public domain all these things are in the public domain right Romeo and Juliet are inthe public domain right they've been in the public domain for a long time now and so what an artistor creator is doing is accelerating that process and we're not going to wait until my death plusx years we're going to put in the public domain now this is what i'm going to respect as theoriginals and then the global culture can remix this uh together and so it strikes me and i'm going toask a narrow question that will go to the economic question from a legal perspective this one seemsstraightforward right like there's not a ton of outstanding issues if let's say i'm an Americani create a piece of art i put it in the public domain are there any ambiguities can we just goahead and treat it as such i wouldn't say there's ambiguities i would just say there's lack ofcontrol for the creators so like let's say that um there's you have that cco like copyright uh orlack of copyright rather image and then someone starts using it with the regulatory politicalcampaigns then there will be no control over you kind of having any say to prevent any of thoseassociations from happening um that will be the only kind of negative that i would say um but i doi do understand the moombas kind of uh did this and i think that they have other issues other thanthey just issuing this i think they should have done this for the beginning without the intentbut um i think the that would be um it's easier to manage you they wouldn't have to kind of legallyenforce any rights uh for on behalf of any holders either so financially and legally it would makesense for them to do that but they only again they only get negative to it is the lack of controlor associations that you may not want with your art so that would be the negative thing i would sayabout that sure right but legally it's clear right it might operationally have the outsideit's clear all right let's let's see the next few slidesyeah so this is this is where i think we are today in pfp projects my sense is in pfp projectsthe whole quote unquote game now is being played between commercial licenses and cco licensesis releasing a pfp project today and saying you just have a personal use license onlyis probably now market uncompetitive right and for pfp projects which are different thanart oriented NFTs i think what we'll play out here and i don't know the answer to this rightand we're going to just have to wait and see which of the following two factors is going toend up being more powerful the case for commercial licenses is if i know i have the exclusive licensefor that board eight that's one of my Bored Apes i might be willing to invest in it because i knowi can monetize it if i invest it and if i knew that even if i invested it you could just take itand use it yourself they may be less willing to invest it right that's the case for commercialrights the again the economic human behavior case let's say and on the public domain side the flipside will be like well sure that everything you said is true but in practice most people won'tmanage to do very much with these things themselves and when you enable the whole worldto help you you'll actually get further i another way of saying it isis i think the public domain folks will say yes you'll get a smaller percentage of a much biggerpie right the value that's going to somehow accrue to you the token holder in sort of ambiguousways today right it's not totally clear that like let's say you le take my cryptotodes and make asuper successful clothing line with it you don't owe me anything right you could make lots of moneywith it and i'll be like oh yes but i'm gaining influence and attention on the original buti mean it's unclear if that actually ever converts back to money to me that's the question butconceptually i think it's this they're saying the pie is going to be biggeryour take rate of the pie is going to be smaller but somehow it's going to be morethan on the other one that most people on most days are not actually going tosuccessfully manage to monetize a PFPs anyway so my sense it's an economic sense not a legal senseis this is where we are in PFPs and now a collection comes out you can't do anythingyou have to wait for the centralized company to do all the work of promoting it drivingattention etc i think is going to be uncompetitive for a new pfp collection now if marvel comes andsells you PFPs right and spider-man and four and what have you that might be different right becausethose are while established brands are ready but for a new brand that needs to be established myguess is is when we're in the latter two categories now any thoughts there are we on yeah can i addsomething yeah just I see one of the issues that i would see in that in that model is thatlet's say you have something on the public domain like uh you know i don't know maybe a member andsomeone else starts using it who's not the token holder and then they end up making it into a reallylarge brand to a point that it becomes a using in commerce that could be trademarked and then theylater on trademark that specific Moonbird as their trademark and then you still have that token solike and again this is on the waters but wouldn't what would be your opinion as to someone else kindof monetizing that potentially for in perpetuity until they choose not to and there's really nowhat will be the value for the holder at that point if any at all when someone else is kindof claiming cop trademark not copyright but trademark rights or that Moonbird that was initiallyin this in the public domain that that would be a concern of mine but what would you do in thatcase now i think that's a very interesting topic i think these topics you know you've seen this withsome open source projects where the project itself is released under an MIT license or somethingbut the trademark is still centrally held right where and there's some type of process forapplying to use the trademark i think is a complicated one and it's a very good pointi don't think there's a straightforward answer. yeah those are one of the issues i see. yeahall right let's see two more examples and i think then we can go to questions and i'm seeing a tonof questions coming through the chat we need to give people a chance to get their questions answeredso in the one of one world this photo here from Gatsomart was i think the most seminal part ofthinking about cc0 in the one of one world it's a great story she was an establishedphotographer pre-nfts and this was one of her most famous images and it was constantly stolenright she'd see it on travel blogs and Instagram accounts and people used them on their advertisementsnever credited her never paid her and this is nothing new than fts right in the off-chain worldand then she said well let me take a different approach and said well i'm going to auction itoff and i think she had a reserve price of a hundred or something and as soon as it's boughtit's going to convert to a public domain license now not strictly speaking of cc0 in her caseshe kept some provisions on hate speech i think and acceptable use in her license but effectivelya public domain license and G-money was a big collector bought it and this was a very um interestingevent because i suspect she monetized this piece more without underneath and her whole prior off-chainhistory of that piece and now it is of course continued to be used by many other people andbut now she feels okay about it because she might not and i think she money feels okay about itbecause it becomes a very it's become a very well-known piece of photography because a lot ofpeople now make derivatives of it and it was interesting because somehow and i'm not sayingthis applies to most people in most photography right doesn't mean that if you put your image inthe public domain you're going to get a hundred each that supply and demand doesn't work that waybut if you're a famous photographer and have a famous image it didn't work out this way and ithought this was a very interesting and creative approach indifferent than the type of dynamicsthat exist in pfps right nothing about this was G-money paid a hundred each because he wants tomake t-shirts with this picture he wants this picture from an art perspective in the same waythat he would buy any other one of one piece but believes that the whole overall system aroundthis photograph is going to drive attention over time and therefore value so i thought this wasvery interesting a semi-controversial last fall 2021 and i think now it's been establishedthat like you know some photographers release some pieces of the public domain and i'm not sayingit's right or wrong it's just a tool right most release them not under a cc0 license and that'sfine but i think it is a tool that artists have that they can think about and use creatively rightand not just in a PFP context and let's see one more slide on this which is x copy. The x copy isvery interesting because he is not just a leading crypto artist he's on most metrics among the veryvery top right and when he started and how many pieces of work he's made and what the prices ofhis art he's on a quantitative basis at the very very top i think he's amazing but that's just apersonal view i say quantitative he's at the very very top and he has a large collection of workand then one day the summer he put all of it in the public domain and what's very interesting andthis has to do with how crypto native he is and therefore also how crypto native his collectorsare nobody complained and it's very interesting because this is different than the moon bird'sdiscussion right moon bird said i'm going to give you commercial rights and then changewhich they're mine and said i actually want to put in the public domain and some people gotannoyed but i understand that right because if you bought it because i want to have commercialrights and now i don't have commercial rights with x copy you never had any rights right you had apurse it was just normal art so you just had a personal license to use it you know i own summerdot jpeg but i couldn't do anything with summer dot jpeg i just could look at it really nice tolook at and then the rights were still an x copy and he said okay well i don't want to hold themanymore i'm going to give them to the world at large interestingly i think the vast majorityof his collectors you're just positive not a negative right now i see derivatives of summerdot jpeg everywhere and i think it's great and i appreciate the point that you say well whatif people use it i mean what people say online is well what if Nazis' start using your art rightlike it's very common thing and i appreciate that in the fullness of time this will happen to someperson and some collector and some artist but on the whole the kind of my first reaction to it youknow most of human art histories in the public domain and nazis aren't going around using likeRenoir's and Van Gogh's and Jane Austen i mean i don't think of nazis as being that art orientedto be totally honest they seem to be more busy doing more obnoxious things than like makingderivatives of important art right so it's an issue but historically when we have data on whathappens when art is in the public domain and how many times it's used for evil and you know generallythe answer is it's not right it has not typically happened with historical art and so i thought thesewere interesting in that it's a very different discussion than the pfp licensing discussionwhere the PFP license of discussion is realistically mostly not about the art right nobody's buyingmost PFP collections because they think oh it's grail art they're buying the collections becausethey believe or hope a community can emerge around them and drive value and so in that context thelicensing discussion is very tactically driven to what's going to encourage people to invest inthe pieces whereas what we saw with kath and what we're seeing here with x copy is yes also cc0 buti think cc0 with a different mental model and framework any thoughts on this no I mean i likehis art too so okay well with that we ran i think i don't i don't want to say we ran over we did anhour and a half and i think that that's what we needed to do this presentation if we had triedto do it an hour i don't think we could have done it so my suggestion is to be i have on my screenopen the questions so i'm going to read the questions and i'm going to let you answer thembecause we have an expert from the uspto here i mean we need to take advantage of thisi love this one this is great how can fedenza be trademarked when there is a town in a reallycalled Fidenza how does the law work in that case um yeah so that's a great question so it would haveto be geographically descriptive and because there's likely no connection or nexus for theactual trademark person or Tyler Hobss in this case um with the actual Fidenza in Italy it wouldnot be descriptive of that specific place so there will have to be a nexus and evidence thatthe trademark is being used geographically descriptive in a geographically descriptivemanner that the standard used so Fedenza so it's basically it's similar to kind ofuh trademarking like a town that's very rural and remote for um computers what would be the nexusthere so similarly that's that the way the trademark office would kind of read that um andthey will have to find evidence that is geographically descriptive in that sense so this comes downto the issue of classes right you don't just get a trademark for everything you have to get atrademark for something specific and Fidenza the town is probably not making an if generative artNFTs and so there's no overlap there right is that yeah what do you think about it I think theyyeah but they're also the easiest way to kind of understand trademarks is the likelihood ofconfusion and that's kind of what trademark says is to prevent consumer confusion in themarketplace in the in commerce so um someone basically the easiest way to understand isif you see Fidenza an NFT are you going to associate Fidenza the town in italy or are yougoing to just refer okay if somebody tells you hey did you buy that Fidenza you're not gonnaassociate it with that italy town you're gonna associate it with the NFT art right so that'sthat's the indicator kind of purpose of of trademarks and that wouldn't be geographicallydescriptive in that sense so it just is intended to prevent the consumer confusion and I don't knowthat Fedenza as the town will create any kind of like confusion and the consumers find that it'srelated to the actual town in Italy yep makes perfect sense okay next question how just wouldlike to confirm that AI works at the moment are not protected under copyright law so no it's nottough it's just there's it's linguistic it's so basically creating a work of art with AIand you name the author the AI system so the author is not you as a humaninputting some code some kind of basic layers into the system or a blender and then the outputis you the owner but you're naming the author the actual machine that created this work sothat's different than saying I used photoshop or I used blender or dally to create this specificwork of art so during the examination process to get a registration and we've seen this beingposted on Twitter lately they are they ask you questions they're going to ask you how did youuse the system what did you input into the system and that's how you're going to determine this wasmostly in again there's no clear line as to what they're using to determine what enoughinput for my human being is as opposed to just machine made um so that that's the differenceis I'm naming the author the machine as opposed to naming me as the author in the creation outputand it's me owning that output um ownership that that was created with the machine does that makesense I hope that that's clear it's it could be confusing. Right my takeaway is how you presentedmight also make a difference right if you go like that case that you mentioned say hey the AI did itregistered on the AI you're gonna get a no right if you're gonna say yeah I did this but I used sometools to help me you might get a yes is that accurate yes yeah it does but it'll in in thatprocess they're going to ask you how much of you how much input from the human being was therebasically in using that that that machine but yes essentially that's how you present it it's goingto make a difference and that there was an article recently on the uh I think it was a comicstrip or a comic book that received a registration using a specific AI system they named themselvesthe human being as the author but they also specified they use midnight uh journey as thesystem that they utilize and during the process of dissemination they probably were asked howmuch input they put into into midnight in order to receive that output so that's howthey receive that cover registration. Got it okay. Next question are all these topics consideredsimilar across all jurisdictions do we need to register a trademark across all jurisdictionsso when you have a for trademarks you will get a federal registration so that federalregistration is basically saying you you have users in commerce across the stateand um that gives you like a federal kind of protection and you don't have to register in aspecific jurisdiction so like a state if that I'm not sure if they're asking international ornational so within the US but within the US you could register it you know with each state butthat's only going to protect you geographically in that area that that geographic area that you'rekind of uh trademarking it so if I were to register in Florida for example you know thatwill give me protection in Florida and that would be with a trademark office in the floorlike they each state has its own trademark process but if you file with the USPTO thenyou're getting a federal registration and that will give you a nationwide protectionand if you wanted international protection though you'd have to file in other countries too rightyou yeah and there's also a system called the Madrid system that allows you to apply it's tohave one one specific application that allows you to have protection different jurisdictionsit's a little bit of a complex system so I won't get into details but you would basically it wouldbe more financially easier to go through that process than having to go through each countrybecause then you'll have to have an attorney in most countries and the USPTO requires that umyou know if you're applying from abroad that you have representation in the US.okay this is the part I think you're saying this is where you get a lawyerI have to explain all these things to you yeah it could be it could be complex it could be complexokay the question says the last week 65 tonight mentioned that most NFTs are not unblocked chainsthey're simple pointers what I what I think this question is most of the art is not on chain it'son ipfs or our wave our server does this create any fragility from a legal point of view um I thinktwo things uh first I think we have AWS holds the terms of use I think there's more fragilityin that sense because you're basically letting a third party host whatever rights you get in thattoken in a third party website in the best case scenario they'll have that also in ipfs but umfragility from a legal standpoint no I think more from a technical standpoint I think that youthe blockchain is always going to dictate you know who's has ownership but the pointers whetherthat pointer works or not I think it's just more creates more of a centralization because someone'sgoing to have to pay for that ipfs so if we're kind of to if we want to emphasize or kind of pushtowards that decentralization you're kind of going against the grain if you have someonehaving to pay for that ipfs to continue hosting that so I think that's why some NFT projectsare moving towards having on chain art and moving the arts on chain so that there's no actualfragility in that sense and our way was a little bit better you pay upfront rather thancontinuously having to pay that's a simple way to describe it but from a copyright perspectiveit shouldn't make a difference right like where it's hosted no not really it noit's kind of like when you buy a painting and you keep it in a museum you know it just dependson which museum you choose and just if you still own the copyright regardless of wherethat that's sitting okay that makes sense this one I'm going to take it says have I deemedmy cryptopunk 6529 is cc0 and the answer is of course no because the further answer isI'm not allowed to that's not my decision to make that's a decision that Yuga Labs was to have to makeif they were ever to make that decision I don't think they will but like in any casethey would be the ones to make that decision I am in effect a licensee of Yuga Labs as it relatesto 6529 there's a license agreement that I have to follow what we mentioned earlierand that license agreement wouldn't allow me to on behalf of you to declare that mypunk is now in the public domain right that's a you get a decision not a me decision this iscorrect is this correct yeah and the way the easiest way to understand is you can give what youdidn't get yourself so you can give more than you received so you receive an exclusive license youcan give an assignment at that point so you can it's kind of like a funnel you can give more thanyou received okay here is a semi-technical question I think I don't think it's hard but let me seeis there ever only one copy of artwork associated with NFT an example they use is IPFS that multiplecopies may exist on each computer that's pinning it which one's the true version and does that evenmatter in any way no it doesn't matter and the way I see it is when the creator and I'm going togive an example so let's say you hire someone to make a piece of art for you the moment they createdthat piece of art and put it in tangible form that's the that's the original basically so anythingelse and again this is untested water so this is just an opinion it will be in maybe some differentpractitioners thing differently but once you put an IPFS that's a copy of that so you know you haveownership over the copyright but that's just basically a display of it or maybe a copy or adisplay of the actual copyright that you have ownership over but the moment that was put intotangible form that would be the original and doesn't really kind of make any differencebecause it's just the way that it is displayed so you could display it on IPFS or aws or Arwaveit is the way that it's being displayed in multiple nodes host those things so that'swhat you're referring to um it would just your copyright would not be affected by thatyep that makes perfect sense another Fidenza question if I sell a Fidenza my Fidenza I wishI don't know if it's a person means they wish they have a Fidenza or they wish they could sella Fidenza uh what happens to the physical printed artwork that I also bought of my piecedoes the new owner have the right to also print the same piece are they open editions or one ofones and I'll just add here I think Tyler does I think just print for the first person who asksregardless of the token but how do we think about this from a copyright perspective um I think thecopyright holder dictates those rights so we will have to go to Tyler Hobbs and those terms heand he he does he prints it for I think the first few um the first I think the first holderand if you go to his website it says like which ones are available and which ones are not um but Iwould I would say that that's depending on him and I know he's mentioned in the past he's he'swritten articles I don't know if any if you've seen this but he wrote an article about why hedidn't want to have cc0 as in his work of art he actually wore what he wanted to keep anon-exclusive license and why that the reason why he kind of leaned towards that but I would leantowards this read the terms of Tyler Hobbs and each one of the Fidenzas in each one of his worksum before we determined that right and so this is a good example of Fidenzas arereleased under a traditional license right they're not a commercial or cc0 and the copyrightis owned by Tyler and that copyright can be expressed in um the nft art that's on Shanein the case of Fidenzas but also a print and because Tyler is in charge whatever the rulesare on printing fidenzas Tyler gets to decide and Tyler could also decide to change the rulesright tomorrow he could say that everyone that has a Fidenza could ask for a print if they wantI mean he might not want to do that but if you wanted to he could right yeah those are copiesthose would be considered copies of the copyright and he would continue to be the owner andhe does not mention anything against cc0 he said just not every project is intended to benz zero and I agree I think they're you know each model is applicable to each project differentlyokay we have a question here about virtual clothing that says of trademark ofclothing is a complicated matter one cannot trademark a plain blue shirt but the logo on itcan we expect that virtual clothing given that the underlying code is unique will be applicableto trademark e.g. will we be able to trademark a plain blue shirt so it would have to indicatesource so the plain blue shirt is not indicating source that would not function as a trademarkbut what you're asking is that it's hard to trade and I don't know if they're confusingcopyrights and trademarks I think you might be a little bit of a confusion there but if it's justthe blue shirt that's indicating source as this source of the remaining goods that you have thenI would apply for a class nine which is a non-domotable digital asset that points to the blue shirtsthat you're selling that would be what you basically have to trademark and that's that thatblue shirt you could actually have a trade dress which is like kind of the pack could be potentiallyeven packaging so like the coca-cola bottle has a trademark on the trade dress so like the waythe coca-cola bottle looks so that's what you're referring to and you could have multiple ways ofkind of protecting that blue shirt that you're referring to. okay and I think you're right itmight be unclear if this is a trademark or a copyright question okay with regards to thecan't-be-evil license what's the licenses development and acceptance trajectory and how are highpotential stakeholders responding to it I think for the benefit of the audience the can't-be-evillicense is a sample NFT commercial license that Andreessen Horowitz developed on their ownI had they had asked me for some feedback that I gave it was an Andreessen Horowitz project thatthen they released to the world and said we think this is a good commercial license and feel freeto use it what are your views on the license have you seen people adopting it you have anyperspective on this um I'll say this I think everyone it's going to I don't like templatespersonally just because I think templates kind of uh you're adopting someone else's thoughtprocess basically on what they intended to give um but I think it's a good framework for you tothink about okay like do I want this and you could slice and dice however you want so like youas a copyright holder you get to have all the bundle of rights that we mentioned earlier at thebeginning and you could slice them and dice them however you want so you could give anyone the rightto for going back to the analogy of the house you could get someone the right to enter your kitchenor only enter your bathroom so it's you you have the say on how much you want to give and what thescope of that is um so for those I think this is a good starting point I really think they did agreat job of kind of like addressing some of the issues in this space but I think you need to readthose through Lindsay how applicable they are to what you're intending to grant and what you'reintending to keep a control over yeah this makes sense it's how I think about it too I mean you haveit's a very interesting template to look at there's no creative common templates look like I meanhonestly I think the cryptopunks license is quite good in that dimension that's another area to lookat and I don't know that any major projects are taking these directly copy pasting and not makingany changes but in a way it doesn't matter right like if there are good ideas and people put them outthere um it'll help the space move forward yeah yeah oh good let's take maybe a couple more questionsand then I mean I thank you we've taken up a lot of your time now we're heading towards two hours soI do want to bring it to an end at some point so let's do a couple more questions and then wrapthis up this is blockchain is borderless which it is or is crypto assets public watch answer borderlesshow do you think about I'm going to rephrase the question a little bit but how do you think aboutcopyright and licensing across a variety of foreign countriesum so that's an interesting question because as far as copyright goes um there's no such thingas international copyright so each country has its own regime that protects authors and they're notextraterritorial so um that does so that our US copyright does not protect against copying outsideof the US works by American authors but we do have some treaties so in specific jurisdictions thathave signed on so treaties like the burn convention um and that basically you and this is a verycomplicated area so I don't want to get too deep into it but if an American author for example isin French in France they will have a member of the treaty party like they will have the samerights as a French author would have um but again there's there's more to it than that so it justmight take on it is um we've been fighting over and international rights and some kind of akind of across the board kind of standardization for a long time I doubt we're going to get toa place where everyone's of the same regime um but there are some treaties that allow us tohave some rights that are similar to or that will have the same treatment if you were in thatjurisdiction and a specific person from that jurisdiction so short answer is it's complicatedpossibly more complicated the internet might be even more complicated than internationaltrademarks less standardized than trademarks are maybe yeah I would say so um it does likethere's section 104 which potentially protects like unpolished works so like there's there's adifferent like a kind of nuances to international space that could be very complex but forthe most part just know that if you are part of a treaty which the US is of such as the burnconvention you likely have some rights in that jurisdiction that's also part of that same treatyand they could be very similar and I don't want to speak in generalizations but yeah they tendto be very similar not to generalize okay last question this is a funny one uhcrypto punks versus crypto funks they look exactly like the exact same pfp just mirror imagewhich any copyright issues there until someone brings the lawsuit then I'll refrain from thatconversation because I know he tried to be mca but um I think it's just depends on who wants tolitigate that okay right so that would be a specific that have to be a specific lawsuiton a specific topic and then we'd discover I assume the crypto funks would make some type offair use commentary type argument and if you go wanted to pursue them they would say it'snot that you're commercially using my copyright but so far this in the broad crypto punks versuscrypto funk sense has not gone to court and so the reality is we don't know until it happenswith a specific set of facts and specific set of arguments how a court would decide right yeah andI say that also because they could bring into question the copyrightability of the cryptopunks so that's why it's it's more than just hey are they similar it's a little bit more complexbecause someone could bring into question like is that even a copyrightable um subject matterbecause they're so they were created by AI or and I know Professor Brian Fry has anarticle on the copyrightability of crypto punks so that's why I think there's a lot of things thatcould come into question if that also comes about in a litigation right so because in a way thatwe're not in a way I mean the crypto punks like a lot of general projects a lot of PFP projectsare generative right you didn't know what streets we're going to get and so what you're saying isis for there to be a lawsuit here you go would have to bring it right and if you'rebrought the copyright holder would have to bring it right yes um and that's because they gave exclusiverights to so like when you give exclusive rights normally and then this is how it's enforced normallywhen you give exclusive rights you give that person who gets that exclusivity the right to sue as wellbecause it's exclusive to you you're basically taking my place as the creator in a way legally speakingso um the holder would have to bring that so if you're somebody's in front of yourpunk you could potentially bring that but then they might come back in the defense and say wellyou don't have something that is not even uh copyrightable because it was created by AI sotherefore there's no there's no actual creation of that's allowed to be copyrighted in the firstplace wow and you have a registration and you have to have a registration in order for you tobring that into law so even in the in the first place you also have to have the registrationwhich you could potentially have and I think they do mention that in the terms of use you could bringthat you could actually register your asset and I think they they mentionedthat briefly in the terms of use amazing but you have yeah they explain how you want they want theywant to keep some kind of control over it over the registration as I think they want to be named asthe the owner and you could be uh or the author I can't recall but it's in the terms of use thatwhether you could register wow this is where this stuff is super interesting super complicated butI mean just utterly fascinating we are here on the frontier I think of IP and technology and networksI think we need to say an utterly gigantic thank-you to Ellie for today she a presentation washers she put it together I just put in the pretty pictures that was my contribution was like I copypasted some pictures in there all of this was Ellie it's obvious she knows everything inside outand backwards I very much appreciate the time she gave us so everyone please give her a virtualround of applause and thank you so much thank you I think you did a lot more than that so thank you