Unlocking the digital realm: exploring NFTs as catalysts for digital copyright exhaustion

Abstract

... The recent years have been marked by rising popularity of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), first appeared in 2017,1 as a means to verify ownership and authenticity of digital assets. The opportunities inherent to the NFT rapidly growing industry can be observed through its projected revenue of US $3,162.00 million by 2027.2 NFTs can represent various forms of creative content, including visual arts, music, video games avatars, twits, gifs, newspaper’s columns, designs or postal stamps.3 Any physical work can also be minted into a NFT, as long as it can be digitized.4 By establishing scarcity and rivalry in digital assets, the blockchain technology and NFTs hold promising potential to introduce a digital copyright exhaustion mechanism, which would greatly benefit creators, consumers and the wider digital economy alike. To thoroughly examine the future prospects in this particular domain, this article commences by scrutinizing the copyright exhaustion doctrine in the light of the current regulatory framework and most notable jurisprudence, particularly the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) rulings exemplified in the seminal judgments of UsedSoft5 and Tom Kabinet.6 Subsequently, an evaluation is undertaken to compare the legal standing attained through these rulings with the outcome of the US ReDigi7 case.