The world's largest online art gallery and community DeviantArt has announced a collaboration with the NFT marketplace OpenSea to detect potential NFT infringement. According to DeviantArt's official statement, the solution can scan public blockchains to identify artworks listed on NFT markets that may infringe on artists' copyrights, and promptly alert the original creators.
DeviantArt: From Traditional Art to Blockchain Copyright Guardian
Founded on August 7, 2000, by Angelo Sotira, Matthew Stephens, Scott Jarkoff, and others, DeviantArt had approximately 65 million registered artists and about 500 million digital artworks as of 2021. Since its inception, the platform has been dedicated to combating potentially infringing content. Now this effort has extended into the blockchain realm.
"We've expanded the scope of our system to identify near matches of minted non-fungible tokens (NFTs) submitted across the Internet," DeviantArt's blog post details. "We monitor public blockchain events involving standard NFT token types (ERC721 and ERC1155) to identify potential art infringement." The DeviantArt team adds: "We realized our technology could be applied to help safeguard deviants on emerging NFT platforms and tested the same machine learning model that powers DeviantArt Protect on NFT listings. The model identified NFTs that originated from artwork submitted on DeviantArt, where the minter was not necessarily the owner of the original work, alerting to potential art infringement."
Beta Results: 86% of Detected Cases Confirmed as Matches
DeviantArt explains that artists who wish to be protected under the DeviantArt Protect umbrella can submit their artwork to the site. The NFT scanning feature checks blockchains for NFT-related activity to find near-identical matches of any registered DeviantArt artists' content. The team revealed to Bitcoin.com News that after the first two months of the beta launch, 86% of the infringement cases detected were successfully verified as matches.
DeviantArt is not the only entity attempting NFT and blockchain copyright protection. Recent reports indicate that Alibaba's NFT marketplace allows content creators to copyright work via the market's blockchain IP service. Microsoft also published a white paper describing an Ethereum-based tool designed to combat pirated online content.