NFT — the latest digital copyright object or form of expression

Abstract

Keywords: NFT, copyright, work, token, blockchain, digital environment, judicialexpertise
 The article is dedicated to current issues of NFT legal protection. There wereanalysed the legal nature of NFT as an object of copyright, the legal regime of NFT —the work, and some proposals for improving the legal regulation of these relations aresubstantiated. It has been proven that in a separate group of copyright objects it is expedientto allocate new digital objects that appear recently — NFT, multimediaworks, video games (computer games), Internet site, blockchain, and others. The legalnature of new digital copyright objects has been found to be controversial. It is establishedthat in the scientific literature NFT is interpreted as an independent object ofcopyright, as a way to use the object of copyright (for example, conversion of art into adigital token form), as an objective form of expression (digital token form), as securitydigital document, as a way of technical protection of the copyright object from encroachmenton it. It has been proven that converting a work into an NFT form is away to commercialize a copyright object. Furthermore, it is substantiated that NFT isa form of expression (existence) of the object of copyright, and NFT-work (photography,video, painting, drawing, music etc.) in the presence of originality (creative nature)is the object of copyright, which is fixed in specific digital tokenized form.It has been established that tokenization of works provides additional opportunitiesfor copyright protection of such objects due to blockchain — the technology onwhich NFT operates.It has been proven that NFT as a digital certificate certifies the uniqueness of thework, which allows increasing its value and avoid illegal distribution in the digital environmentin the future (which is typical of almost all digital and digitized copyrightobjects). Likewise, it has been proven that most NFT disputes should be resolvedbased on the findings of judicial intellectual property and computer science expertise.It has been established that copyright law is not adapted to regulate the use of worksin the digital environment, so NFT works have an undefined legal regime as objects ofcopyright. It has been proven that the current copyright law, which is imperfect in regulatingrelations in the digital environment in general, should be applied to the relationsrelated to the creation, use, exercise, and protection of NFT works.