A group of free, public “Can’t Be Evil” licenses will soon be made available by Silicon Valley’s Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), the company’s crypto division. Based on the Creative Commons’ work, the organization created licenses expressly for non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
Key Highlights:
- These licenses specify the authorized and forbidden actions of an NFT holder.
- In the NFT industry, copyright has always been poorly defined.
- The licenses are comparable to those that Creative Commons provides.
What was the reason behind licensing?
Holders are granted permission to use their photos to create and sell derivative works of art and merchandise by several well-known NFT enterprises, most notably the Bored Ape Yacht Club. However, there are concerns about whether such intellectual property licenses are legally binding or whether authors intentionally mislead consumers. Andreessen Horowitz, a prominent venture capital firm, claims it wants to assist.
The VC firm declared the availability of “Can’t Be Evil” NFT licensing terms for any project authors to employ at their discretion. The licenses offer a variety of various strategies for NFT projects, from restricted terms for personal use to more open-ended licenses that allow anybody to use the artwork for any purpose—even if they don’t own an NFT.
The company’s General Counsel, Miles Jennings, and Chris Dixon, Founder, wrote in a blog post that “Whereas currently many NFT holders have to trust creators and previous owners to make ‘not-evil’ decisions regarding their NFTs, projects using ‘Can’t Be Evil’ licenses can make NFT ecosystems more trustless, providing holders with a minimum baseline of standard real-world rights, thereby harmonizing real-world ownership with on-chain ownership.”
“By making the licenses easy (and free) to incorporate, we hope to democratize access to high-quality licenses and encourage standardization across the Web3 industry,” the writers wrote. “Greater adoption could lead to incredible benefits for creators, owners, and the NFT ecosystem as a whole.”
