The present analysis must start from the premise that NFTs do not inherently possess -nor grant- rights of use, much less licenses. That is why it must be accompanied by a contract in which the underlying content of the NFT is expressly transferred. To this effect, the authorization that the holder of the economic rights of a literary, artistic, musical, audiovisual or software work gives to other persons on what they can and cannot do with the work, is made through a License of Use.
Licenses of use
The license is a document that expresses the author's will on the limits and scope of the use that people can make of the work:
- Copy,
- Reproduction,
- Modification,
- Translation and
- Adaptation.
In this sense, a variety of types of licenses can be found, ranging from the most restrictive, in which the author reserves all rights (hence the expression "all rights reserved"), to the most permissive licenses in which the author author authorizes a wide possibility of uses of the work to persons ("some rights reserved"), the extreme of this possibility being the public domain.
Pursuant to Article 56 of Royal Legislative Decree 1/1996 of April 12, 1996, the acquirer of the ownership of the support to which the work has been incorporated shall not have, by this sole title, any right of exploitation over the latter.
In all these types of licenses is the principle of respect for moral rights, which implies that at no time can a person claim authorship of a work that he has not created, regardless of the license it has.
Disclaimers
The way to indicate the terms of the License of Use in a work is through a legend that summarizes what can and cannot be done with the work. For example:
All Rights Reserved © Name of the Author and/or Name of the Label/Publisher/Distributor licensed to EJEMPLO SL.
The sale, distribution, diffusion, total or partial reproduction of this work, by any means, in terms contrary to those provided for in our Terms and Conditions of Use, is prohibited.
If we use, for example, OpenSea to mine our NFTs, the platform enables a field for the description of the NFT. This would be the place to place the corresponding disclaimer.
However, in the case of more sophisticated platforms, the ideal would be to add the heading in a freezable NFT metadata field and place it in a visible location on the web page.
International legal coverage
To provide international copyright coverage, we recommend using the licensing standards of the Creative Commons Foundation. There are six types of licenses and they are ordered from most permissive to least permissive:
- CC BY: This license allows users to distribute, transform, adapt and work on the material in any medium or format, as long as the creator is cited. This license allows commercial use.
- CC BY-SA: This license allows users to distribute, modify, adapt and use the material in any medium or format, as long as the creator is cited. The license allows commercial use. If the user modifies, adapts or transforms the material, they must license the modified work under the same terms.
- CC BY-NC: This license allows users to distribute, adapt and transform the material in any medium or format for non-commercial purposes, as long as the creator is cited.
- CC BY-NC-SA: This license allows users to distribute, adapt, transform and use the material in any medium or format for non-commercial purposes, provided the creator is credited. If you modify, adapt, transform and use the material, you must license the modified material under the same terms.
- CC BY-ND: This license allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format without adapting it, as long as the creator is cited. The license allows commercial use.
- CC BY-NC-ND: This license allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format without adapting it, only for non-commercial purposes and as long as the creator is cited.
Creative Commons recommends that in order to choose the most appropriate license for our interests we answer the following questions:
- Do you want to allow adaptations of the work to be shared?
- Do you want to allow commercial uses of the work?
- Do you want to allow royalties from each prospective vendor?
Once the preferred criteria have been selected, we generate a license on the Creative Commons portal and give it visibility on the website and in the NFT metadata.
An example of what the visual of a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND license would look like:
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Vicox Legal can assist you in any legal matter related to copyrights, licenses of use, intellectual property, industrial property and registration of trademarks and patents.
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