Purpose: This paper examines blockchain technologies as instruments to strengthen archival management by providing verifiable authenticity, tamper evidence, and resilient traceability for digital records. It situates blockchain within Oman Vision 2040 and evaluates how distributed ledger technology (DLT) can be piloted and integrated with existing archival infrastructures. Method/Approach: A qualitative case-study approach synthesizes three evidence streams: international pilot project reports such as ARCHANGEL, peer-reviewed literature and technical white papers (2017–2024), and semi-structured expert interviews and institutional readiness analyses from Oman. Thematic analysis examined three domains: integrity & authenticity, transparency & access, and institutional readiness & governance. Results: Blockchain provides a cryptographic chain-of-custody and tamper-evident anchoring model for archival objects by writing content fingerprints to distributed ledgers while storing content off-chain. International pilots show feasibility; however, challenges include governance design, legal recognition, interoperability, cost, and capacity building. Conclusion: Blockchain is a promising augmentation to archival toolkits but is not a substitute for core preservation practices. Recommendations include staged pilots in Oman, a hybrid architecture, standardized hashing and metadata practices, training, and regional consortia for governance and cost distribution.
The growth of digital music streaming platforms has changed the way music is distributed and accessed across the world. These platforms make music easily available to listeners the royalty distribution process still faces several challenges. Limited transparency, delayed payments, and the involvement of multiple intermediaries often reduce efficiency and affect the earnings received by artists. This work shows a blockchain-based framework for music royalty distribution. The given system combines Ethereum smart contracts, Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), and the Inter Planetary File System (IPFS) to support secure ownership management and automated royalty payments. Smart contracts execute royalty transactions based on predefined conditions, while NFTs represent ownership of digital music files. IPFS is used for decentralized storage to maintain secure and tamper resistant media files. By reducing dependency on central authorities, the framework makes royalty transactions easier to track and supports fair revenue distribution for artists. The obtained results show fast royalty processing and improved revenue sharing compared with old royalty management systems [18].
This chapter explores the legal and economic dimensions of Non-Fungible Tokens as instruments of digital scarcity. It examines their technical architecture, legal qualification, and evolving regulatory approaches in the European Union and the United States through a comparative perspective. By contrasting derivative and specific forms of regulation, the analysis highlights the challenges of integrating Non-Fungible Tokens into existing legal frameworks. The chapter concludes by emphasising the need for regulatory frameworks that provide legal certainty while preserving the innovative potential of blockchain technologies, highlighting how the controlled creation of digital scarcity can redefine value and trust in the digital environment. Keywords: NFT, digital scarcity, digital assets, value, comparative law, EU Regulation, US Regulation.
The anonymity of cryptocurrency transactions poses substantial obstacles to protecting consumer rights, particularly by hindering tracking and dispute resolution, thereby making it challenging to safeguard consumers. This article examines India's legal framework for protecting consumers engaging in cryptocurrency transactions. It highlights the multifaceted challenges consumers face, including fraud, hacking, phishing, and market manipulation, primarily due to the anonymous nature of cryptocurrency transactions and the inherent lack of robust regulation. Comparing India's approach with that of the US, EU, and Japan, it identifies noticeable gaps in current regulations and subsequently proposes specific, actionable recommendations for improvement. The article emphasises the imperative need for consumer education and awareness, as well as for international cooperation among policymakers, industry stakeholders, and regulators to create a safer, more secure cryptocurrency environment. By analyzing consumer protection laws in depth and proposing amendments, it aims to balance transaction security effectively with investor protection, ultimately promoting a more reliable cryptocurrency ecosystem in India while also suggesting practical implementation strategies for regulators and fostering transparency in decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms to enhance overall market integrity. It further outlines specific policy frameworks that can be adopted to mitigate risks associated with anonymity, alongside actionable steps for enhancing dispute-resolution mechanisms and ensuring continual compliance with evolving global standards in digital asset regulation. KEYWORDS:- cryptocurrency transactions, consumer rights, legal framework, consumer education, transaction security
Il lavoro considera l'applicabilità delle regole in tema di diritto d'autore e segnatamente di diritto di seguito ai c.d. non fungible token, distinguendo a seconda di opere digitali o di opere su supporto fisico.
<p class="MsoNormal" align="justify">The latest technology Non-Fungible Token (NFT) supports ownership of objects on the internet; everyone wants to reap the maximum of this opportunity. The price of the NFT shot up overnight, creating a market with trading volumes of millions worth, but there seem to be issues related to the legitimacy of this technology. Some countries define the legality of NFTs, cryptocurrencies, and cryptocurrency-based smart contracts, but they are just a handful of them; there requires the assessment of standards in NFT for full-fledged expansion throughout the world. The majority of the problems are related to the security of the users, price volatility of NFTs, and copyright issues. In this research, the evaluation is achieved by applying methods to identify the standards present in the current NFT ecosystem. The methods acquire quantitative and qualitative information to analyze it by designing models based on Correlation and Total Connectedness Index formulas to give the perspective of the inter relation between NFTs and other financial assets and deeply examine the technology's compliance with the regulations like KYC requirements and copyright registrations. The research uses numerical and non-numerical data from various sources, which are familiar with the crypto community. The results manifest the standards of NFTs, stabilization measures to the NFT market, and it guides investors, developers, and entrepreneurs. May be there is a prerequisite for the design change, viewpoint for alternative replacements for establishing smart contracts between the parties engaged in NFT ventures. Contemplating the level of centralization required on NFTs for protection of the stakeholders in the financial market.</p>
This research is motivated by the considerable amount of attention given to cryptocurrencies, and more importantly for music, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) as a vehicle for transforming the music business. Based on two surveys, applying ordinal logit models, this research investigates variables possibly associated of awareness of NFTs across countries of the European Union as well as the in the five largest European countries, i.e., France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the U.K. An ordered logit approach is applied to the separate and pooled E.U. data sets and to the data for the “Big Five” E.U. countries. Particularly given the troublesome events in digital assets markets in 2022, it is reasonably clear that there are issues of asymmetry and lack of transparency in these markets suggesting that there is a pressing need for marketers, issuers, and purchasers of digital assets to enhance their crypto literacy.
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The main objective of this paper is to outline the psychological aspects of trading in the music NFT (non-fungible tokens) ecosystem, with special emphasis on the psychological background of buying NFTs. Since the most important feature of NFTs is the acquisition of ownership enabled by technological solutions, we assume that each purchase of a token does not only imply an economic exchange of ownership, but also the activation of psychological ownership. Having in mind that psychological ownership is a relative category that depends, among other factors, on the nature of the target to which it is attached, our investigation is conceptual rather than empirical. By connecting the already identified cores of psychological ownership to the characteristics of some of the most prominent music NFT drops, we aim to theoretically define general dimensions of psychological ownership through which emotional and social connections to music NFTs as objects of ownership emerge. We conclude that the NFT market reinforces psychological ownership by providing consumers valuable outcomes. In terms of music NFTs, the concept of psychological ownership can be explained by several intertwined dimensions that create emotional and social connections and motivate users to purchase these digital goods. These include a sense of unique possession, identity and self-expression, a sense of belonging to a community, and investment opportunities. The NFT drops discussed illustrate how leveraging different aspects of psychological ownership can transform a music release into a special experience that reshapes the relationship between fans and musicians. Examining fans’ purchases of music NFTs from a psychological perspective can help musicians better understand blockchain users’ behaviour towards music, which is essential for developing NFTs into a sustainable digital format for music revenue.
Traditional property law was built on the physics of tangibility-land, bricks, and physical goods. The defining characteristic of a property right has long been exclusivity: if I possess an object, you cannot. However, the rise of digital assets, from cloud-hosted data and software licenses to non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and virtual real estate, has fundamentally challenged this paradigm. This paper examines the friction between classical property doctrines and digital assets, arguing that modern legal frameworks must shift from an absolute ownership model to a nuanced "bundle of rights" approach to prevent corporate overreach while protecting consumer interests.
A Non-Fungible Token (NFT) is a digital token without equivalence, so unlike a digital currency, NFT cannot be used as a tool of exchange. Instead, NFT represents an object and certifies the scarcity of the object, verifies the owner of the object, and provides the owner with a specific means to move the object as a digital asset. Objects which are represented by NFTs can consist of artistic works, signs, and other visual objects on the internet. So, NFT objects can also be the object of Copyrights’ artistic works or unique aspects of Geographical Indications and Cultural Heritage. The problem is, guaranteeing the scarcity of NFT’s objects is not exactly the same with guaranteeing the originality of Copyrights’ works nor the true origin of Geographical Indications and Cultural Heritage’s objects. There are phenomena where the unique appearances of Champagne wine’s bottle and India’s cultural heritage have been minted as NFTs by individuals other than the collective right holders and being sold at high prices. In this regard, using case study, juridical analytic and legal comparison methods, this article analyzes the potential problems of the intersection between NFT with Geographical Indications and Cultural Heritage and how the problems could be solved in the further amendments of the related laws.
Classical political economy treats private property as foundational to economic coordination and individual autonomy. This paper argues that while private property remains formally intact, it has been substantively hollowed out by the erosion of privacy in the information age. The central claim is that private information—defined as the owner's privileged epistemic access to knowledge relevant to her assets—is a necessary condition for meaningful private property. When such information is no longer privately controlled, ownership persists only as legal fiction rather than effective sovereignty. Through analysis of software licensing, smart property, and decentralized finance, the paper shows how contemporary property increasingly functions as conditional, reversible, access-based arrangements dependent on informational infrastructures governed by others. Revisiting Hayek's epistemological defense of property, the analysis demonstrates that the loss of informational privacy undermines the assumptions that allowed private property to sustain an extended order. The paper engages with objections from information economics and cryptographic privacy, examines systemic risks to economic stability, innovation, and political order, and concludes that the defining challenge of our time is not the abolition of private property, but the disappearance of the private itself.
In the digital era, consumers increasingly encounter an illusion of ownership when purchasing copyrighted works such as video games, digital music albums, or e-books. Under dominant licensing models exacerbated by cloud computing and subscription services users acquire mere access rights rather than true property interests, rendering their acquisitions vulnerable to platform shutdowns, account terminations, or service discontinuations. This phenomenon marks the “vanishing ownership” of digital content, eroding the traditional balance struck by the First Sale Doctrine in U.S. copyright law and the Exhaustion Principle in EU law. This article examines the failure of these doctrines to adapt to digital distribution, as evidenced by landmark cases. It further explores emerging challenges and opportunities posed by cloud-based services and Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), which promise transferable digital ownership but raise unresolved questions about copyright exhaustion, resale rights, and potential disruptions to rightholders’ licensing revenues. Through comparative legal analysis and doctrinal critique, this study argues for reconstructing the First Sale Doctrine and digital exhaustion to restore consumer property rights. It proposes hybrid legislative and technological solutions, including limited exhaustion for permanently downloaded works, mandatory resale mechanisms, and blockchain-enabled forward-and-delete protocols.
Dec 23, 2025·Proceedings of the ... Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences/Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences
Tejas Kotha, Kushagra Bhatnagar, Leona Chandra Kruse, Matti Rossi
NFTs (non-fungible tokens) promised the interaction of artists/creators directly with their collectors without the need for any intermediaries, but the realisation was quick that such a technology, instead of getting rid of intermediaries, reintroduced new intermediaries in the form of NFT marketplaces. These marketplaces exhibit diverse features and cater to different user groups. A wide array of governance strategies, such as curation and gatekeeping, are used to steer creativity and interactions in the marketplace, informed by the marketplace's strategy. We examined this diversity by identifying the 'ideal types' of marketplaces based on these strategies alongside the motivations of the creators to make sense of the growing NFT market and constructed a typology that distinguishes four kinds of NFT marketplaces: Avant-garde, Canonical, Mass Culture, and Coterie. The article also offers practical implications for creators and collectors looking to make informed choices when deciding to participate in a particular marketplace.