Can’t Be Evil

New NFT Licensing aids in keeping NFT IP rights legit.

Legal ambiguity is one of the issues when dealing with the rights you hold on your NFTs. There is a bit of confusion as to what rights are granted to holders and there is finally someone who wants to shed a light on the situation.

Bored Ape Yacht Club has been known to grant its holders the rights to their images and the ability to create derivative artwork and products with the NFT. Holders can create merchandise, images, videos, games, and even restaurants using the rights they hold to their apes. Eminem and Snoop Dogg used their Bored Apes in a music video and Universal Music Group created an entire band from theirs.

There are questions being raised as to whether or not the licenses given are legally durable, as some seem to think the creators have somewhat duped the holders. 

Venture Capital firm Andreessen Horowitz wants to remedy this issue. The firm announced the release of the “Can’t Be Evil” NFT licensing terms that are readily available for any project to use free of charge. The license is inspired by the work of Creative Commons model. The CC model is a level of permissions granted by the original creators for copyright holders, be it for derivatives, adaptations, commercial use or whatever, the CCO is the most permissive and dictates the copyrights to public domain.

With the “Can’t Be Evil” license the NFT creators are able to release the IP rights of the art, grant holders a baseline of irrevocable,enforceable, and easy to understand rights, and help creators , holders, and the community to unleash the creative and economic potential. All of this is meant to help build a framework or the project to be the best it can be with a clear set of rules for the property.

The license will extend a principle of distributing trust across participants and building rules in a enforced atmosphere. The rights of NFT creators, buyers, and sellers will be transparently codified so that every party as a common understanding of the rights associated with the NFT ownership. The licenses are clearly understandable as the rights are explicitly outlined and the buyers rights are made clear. The license is created with six options each with a different set of rights with different degrees of permissiveness.

The licenses are currently available on the a16z crypto GitHub and there are additional considerations that can be used in a legal primer. The licenses have also been placed under the CCo agreement which dedicated them to public domain this allows for the community to alter it to the needs of the project.

The rights offered by the licenses are irrevocable and so there can be no changes made to them or amendments once they have been implemented. There are permissions for adaptation with tenements that gives rights to owners across and entire collection to modify without increasing the risk of potential dispute among the community.

Any piece of NFT that has a license or sub license will lose that license and be given the “Can’t Be Evil” license instead as that license will be passed along, this allows for users to get a fair NFT without any restrictions from the previous owner.

There is much more to read regarding teh “Can’t Be Evil” licenses and you can find out more about that here.