The world's largest online art gallery and community Deviantart has announced a collaboration with the non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace Opensea to detect potential NFT infringement using artificial intelligence. According to Deviantart's official blog, the solution scans public blockchains to identify potential art infringement listed on NFT markets and alerts Deviantart artists.
Deviantart and Opensea Join Forces to Scan Blockchains for NFT Infringement
Deviantart, launched on August 7, 2000, by Angelo Sotira, Matthew Stephens, Scott Jarkoff, and others, is home to approximately 65 million registered artists and nearly 500 million digital artworks as of 2021. The platform has long worked against removing potentially infringing artwork submissions, and now it is extending its protection to the NFT space.
“We’ve expanded the scope of our system to identify near matches of minted non-fungible token (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 team explains that the same machine learning model powering Deviantart Protect was tested on NFT listings and successfully identified NFTs that originated from artwork submitted on Deviantart, where the minter was not necessarily the owner of the original work.
Beta Trial Results: 86% of Detected Cases Successfully Verified
Deviantart states that artists who want protection can submit their artwork to the site, and the NFT scanning feature checks blockchains for NFT-related activity to find near-identical matches. After the first two months of the beta launch, 86% of the infringement cases detected were successfully verified as matches, demonstrating the high accuracy of the machine learning model.
Deviantart is not alone in trying to protect NFT creators. Alibaba’s NFT marketplace allows content creators to copyright work via the market’s blockchain IP service, and Microsoft recently published a white paper describing an Ethereum-based tool designed to combat pirated online content.
As the NFT market continues to expand, art infringement remains a pressing issue. The partnership between Deviantart and Opensea provides a new line of defense for original artists and sets a technological precedent for rights protection in the industry.