A court in China’s eastern city of Hangzhou held NFTCN’s parent company, BigVerse, accountable for allowing a user to mint NFTs from stolen artwork.
In a landmark judgment, the court accused the Chinese digital art trading platform of failing to verify whether the user hitting the NFT was, in fact, the rightful owner of the artwork.
NFT Artwork Theft
According to the report by South China Morning Post, the court ruled that NFTCN was at fault for allowing the infringement of the owner’s “right to disseminate works through information networks.”
The lawsuit against BigVerse was filed by Shenzhen-based company Qice. The requester said that a user of the NFTCN Marketplace listed a non-fungible token with an artwork of a cartoon tiger receiving a vaccine created by artist Ma Qianli. The cartoon image was sold by an anonymous user for $137, according to the report.
To compensate for the loss, BigVerse was ordered to pay Qice a fine of $611 and stop the NFT from being circulated by sending it to an “eater address,” which is essentially a crypto wallet with no private key.
The court argued that BigVerse is responsible for monitoring user actions that violate the rights of other customers because it directly profits from those transactions. He further suggested that the NFT marketplace establish a copyright verification mechanism to review the artworks uploaded by users on its platform.
The latest development comes less than a month after the popular Chinese messaging app – WeChat – announced suspending a few accounts linked to NFTs to prevent speculation in the digital assets.
China’s NFT ecosystem
Despite Chinese regulators’ distaste for cryptocurrency trading and mining operations, the NFT digital art market is booming.
So far, the country has permitted NFTs but banned individuals from speculating and trading them. Tech goliaths such as Alibaba, Tencent, and JD, have come up with their own initiatives that allow users to purchase and collect NFTs. However, they are barred from trading or reselling their purchases.
As previously reported, China’s state-backed blockchain infrastructure Blockchain Services Network (BSN) has announced plans to launch NFTs. In an effort to accelerate this adoption, BSN has partnered with Neo to create a permissionless channel – Jiuquan.
