In 2021, online auction platform NFT Nifty Gateway tweeted to promote a video titled House of Marcial which represented a room filled with the famous sculptures of Ai Weiwei. The problem? It was not made or endorsed by the Chinese dissident artist.
Amid the parabolic rise of NFTs over the past year, cases like this are becoming more common, and fakes and forgeries have become a headache for the markets. But a new proprietary tool hopes to change that.
MarqVision, an AI-powered IP protection service, aims to protect brands and artists against NFT counterfeits. It fetches data from NFT platforms like OpenSea, Superrare, and Rarible, giving subscribers a way to report fakes and potential fakes.
According to its managing director, Mark Lee, a Harvard law graduate and expert in trademark counterfeiting and intellectual property theft, the goal is to automatically report counterfeit listings to the respective NFT marketplaces via bots that analyze new listings a times per week.
“The NFT landscape is a new frontier – and right now it’s operating a lot like the Wild West,” Lee said. The arts journal. “Brands are struggling to balance using their digital assets for marketing and sales purposes with protecting their intellectual property, as well as preventing their customers from unknowingly buying counterfeit NFTs. .”
The problem has become so widespread that some marketplaces have launched their own internal tools to flag potential counterfeits. Earlier last year, DeviantArt introduced Protect, an image recognition tool that automatically notifies users of copyright infringement in NFT marketplaces.
Another tool called SnifflesNFT also uses image recognition, automatically issuing takedown requests on behalf of artists, while Rarible has taken steps to address the issue by implementing a human-moderated verification system, which allows sellers and creators to connect to social media accounts in hopes of preventing NFTs from unverified sellers from appearing in searches.
With the total market capitalization With NFTs currently at over $10 billion, scammers seem eager to take advantage of the lax rules and enforcement mechanisms in major NFT marketplaces. The issue even prompted the creation of a Twitter account, @NFTtheft, which has documented some of the most egregious cases, compiling a thread of useful resources to help artists in the event that one of their NFT works has been subject to NFT. of a counterfeit.