Digital Art as ‘Monetised Graphics’: Enforcing Intellectual Property on the Blockchain

Abstract

In a global economic landscape of hyper-commodification and financialisation, efforts to assimilate digital art into the high-stakes commercial art market have so far been rather unsuccessful, presumably because digital artworks cannot easily assume the status of precious object worthy of collection. This essay explores the use of blockchain technologies in attempts to create proprietary digital art markets in which uncommodifiable digital artworks are financialised as artificially scarce commodities. Using the decentralisation techniques and distributed database protocols underlying current cryptocurrency technologies, such efforts, exemplified here by the platform Monegraph, tend to be presented as concerns with the interest of digital artists and with shifting ontologies of the contemporary work of art. I challenge this characterisation, and argue, in a discussion that combines aesthetic theory, legal and philosophical theories of intellectual property, rhetorical analysis and research in the political economy of new media, that the formation of proprietary digital art markets by emerging commercial platforms such as Monegraph constitutes a worrisome amplification of long-established, on-going efforts to fence in creative expression as private property. As I argue, the combination of blockchain-based protocols with established ambitions of intellectual property policy yields hybrid conceptual-computational financial technologies (such as self-enforcing smart contracts attached to digital artefacts) that are unlikely to empower artists but which serve to financialise digital creative practices as a whole, curtailing the critical potential of the digital as an inherently dynamic and potentially uncommodifiable mode of production and artistic expression.

Some aspects of copyright and related rights protection in digital environment

“…It is necessary to point out that proving of existence is quite typical for similar platforms too. For example, as Martin Zeilinger says, Monegraph allows creators, owners, and collectors to document and verify the authenticity and provenance of the digital artefacts [8]. It should be also noted that the deposition of a certain copyright or related rights object (for example, a literary work) means that it was put into the decentralized ledger in a digital form.…”

I Rest My Case! The Possibilities and Limitations of Blockchain-Based IP Protection

“…It is suggested that the use of Blockchain may disrupt the existing creative distribution networks, with [15] questioning how market will react to increased copyright control. Others question whether the "models of centralized finance will be far from being disrupted but rather reinforced" [26]. In a nutshell, literature points to some challenges inherent to the Blockchain technology, but also raises important issues related to implementation and market acceptance.…”

“…Intellectual property law has emerged as a way to prevent unauthorized distribution of creative expressions due to easy mechanical, technological, and digital reproduction [26]. Some papers have researched the articulation of Blockchain with traditional copyright law [17].…”

Blockchain Identities: Notational Technologies for Control and Management of Abstracted Entities

“…Therefore, Monegraph enters into the political economy of copyright and its troubled interaction with the digital. However, the set of copyright tools enabled by the system might be insufficient to actually protect artists, as Martin Zeilinger () has pointed out. What is more substantial, though, is that Monegraph has conceptually narrowed the possibilities of the digital, especially with respect to digital arts.…”