has an NFT theft (right click save) ever gone to trial? did anyone ever sue for NFT theft?
this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2025
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That's not NFT theft. The original author of the image holds rights to the image, so they could (if they were insane enough) try prosecuting saving a jpeg.
The NFT owner holds the token, not the image.
The NFT doesn’t hold the rights to the image. That’s one of the biggest parts of NFTs. Transferring the NFT doesn’t transfer the image rights, because the NFT doesn’t inherently hold any image rights. The NFT is simply a string of characters that say you own the specific image. But it doesn’t confer any actual rights, aside from being able to say that you own it.
I could mint an NFT for the US constitution. That doesn’t mean I can sue others for reprinting it. Because owning that NFT doesn’t mean I own the copyright for the constitution. I also couldn’t stop someone (like congress) from changing the constitution later. Because again, I don’t actually own the rights to the constitution. All I own is an NFT, which says I own the constitution.
NFT theft would require stealing that token. But again, stealing the token wouldn’t steal the rights to the constitution, because the token didn’t actually confer any ownership rights to the constitution.
The NFT doesn’t hold the rights to the image (...)
Yes, that's what I said.
so you're saying that an NFT owner could sue someone who right click saves a jpeg by claiming copyright infringement?
I'm assuming that by now, someone would have tried that in court. possible, but all court cases regarding NFTs tend to be about fraud or stealing the NFT itself rather than going after someone who just right click save the image.
which would be such a BS trial. because they are automatically downloaded in a temp cache whenever you see it displayed in a website.
They're saying the opposite of that. The image creator could theoretically do so for copyright infringement if they were so inclined, as they retain the rights to the image. The NFT owner owns the Token embedded in the image. The image itself it not what is being traded when NFTs are traded, the ownership rights to the token associated with the image are being traded.
so you’re saying that an NFT owner could sue someone who right click saves a jpeg by claiming copyright infringement?
No, because they don't hold any rights towards the image. They have the rights to the token proving "ownership" of the image.
Think of it this way: many museums and galleries have art that doesn't belong to them, but rather to private parties. These owners have documents proving they own the piece of art, but you can, at any time, go to such a museum/gallery and snap a photograph of the art. Or even buy a professional replica.
NFT is the document proving ownership.
I think the trend died so quickly that nobody cared about theft lol
I would be shocked, that's pretty much just a joke about NFTs. The people who own them think being part of the club is what's valuable, not the jpeg.
A lot of IP theft and license violations is not prosecuted anyway.
They were hosted on AWS! 😅 I thought the expensive ones at least had to be good enough to have the assets on IPFS.
It's unrealistic to expect 100% apetime.
Blockchain can’t really store an entire image (it could, but that would be a loooooot of space), so you’re just buying a URL. Imagine paying for a URL of an image of an ape.
It would cost tens of thousands of dollars per megabyte or something
but isn't that their point? i was always confused by this
No.
What you're buying is a non fungible token on a specific contract. This contact may link to an external resource for the image. It should be IPFS but some contracts link to a specific IPFS gateway. Either way [with IPFS] the link contains a cryptography secure ID of the image. Sometimes the contract just links to a private website.
The owner of the NFT does not own the image and certainly not its copyright. They own a number inside a specific "smart" contract.
The copyright owner can also legally make another NFT for the same image set. In fact I think anyone can because the links to the images on IPFS aren't copyrightable. Although [regular] contracts and defamation law might mess with that. Although they can't then change the original smart contract outside its logic.
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So, I get what you mean. Think about it more like this. Gold is expensive, right? People want gold because it's valuable. But what if gold was way more inconvenient to move around. Like if it was way bigger. That's not desirable. You want it to be valuable, but not expensive to manage. (Security aside, because obviously you want to protect your valuable things. But even if gold was inconvenient to work with and you had a lot you'd still want security.)
Cryptocurrency Blockchains give the miners rewards for working, but there are also transaction fees. The miners get that too. If the amount of data you're storing in the Blockchain is bigger, then the fee would be bigger. Which isn't good.
I hope that clears it up lol, I don't know if I made sense.
Quick aside: Always irks me when someone says "Blockchain" singular, like it's a proper noun entity cargo cult god. "A blockchain" is a particular type of data structure akin to a decentralized linked list, or in the context of one particular cryptocurrency you'd say "the blockchain". I know that the crypto VCs use the word in that singular proper noun way, but they're doing that intentionally to cultivate a misplaced reverence and we shouldn't ape them.
Anyway bitcoin core v30, which just released, expands the maximum data size of a non-monetary transaction parameter called the "OP_RETURN" from 80B to 100kB, meaning that normal bitcoin transactions really can now store plain old jpgs with basically zero extra encoding. It was a wildly controversial change within the dev community, some people probably being paid under the table to push it through etc, but yeah it can do that now. I assume that some blackhat has already put CSAM onto the blockchain in protest.
However at this time you only have to pay < 0.2 sats/Byte to almost guarantee your transaction goes into the next block, so absent miners showing discretion and refusing to mint big OP_RETURNs, that 100kB transaction would actually only cost about 20,000 satoshi, or ~22 USD.
It was a wildly controversial change within the dev community
Sounds like it would be, isn't the reason to keep storage expensive that everything included in a transaction needs to be stored forever by every single network participant running a full node?
Yeah that's the dominant perspective, and the way I see it. The core devs seem to have the perspective that if they don't allow storage of arbitrary data, they'll only encourage the abuse of other transaction parameters to work around it, or encourage anticompetitive side channels where users pay miners directly to include their zany data. And that by opening the floodgates, they allow market competition to decide how much that data is actually worth.
The blockspace has not exploded to capacity with OP_RETURN data in the past week, so the whole controversy could just end up being what politicians these days call a "nothingburger", without even the demand to reveal who was right now that the NFT craze has mostly ended. And if that's the case, the core devs technically made the right choice. We'll see.
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All my apes gone
No no no, an NFT purchase only means you own the concept of that NFT.
I learned that from Futurama.
But if you saved someone else's to your computer, you could still see it, lol
nooooooo that's illegal /s
I paid thousands for that URL please be respectful when you access it, the few months it's accessible.
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One person sold some NFTs then changed the images to rugs, no clearer way of showing what your actually paying for.
instead of spending money on an nft you should just pay $20 to get punched in the face
Too cheap, it cost about 200$ to process an NFT transaction on top of whatever price it was meant to have.
when they were talking about having nft movie tickets, those tickets would have been over 200$ each.
it was as expensive as stupid
All our apes...gone
Not related to the outage itself, but I wonder... can I take an existing NFT's URL, add a shard (or modify the existing one?), and mint it as a new NFT?
The same URL can be used for an infinite number of NFTs, no idea about that shard thing, tho.
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Are you telling me people are STILL paying money for these in 2025? Cause it does say 7. something ETH right there.
if there's a consistent track record of being able to sell an nft for more than one paid for it, people are more likely to buy it just so they can sell it later for more than it was purchased for. It's not that much different than any other kind of authenticated memorabilia; you're not paying for the memorabilia, you're paying to track the authentication in a repeatable consistent way.
You know the banana with tape over it art piece, right? There is nothing special about the tape or the banana at all, the special part is the authenticated set of instructions that allow the 'owner' of the certificate to present the work according to specifications, and since the maintainer of the records proving authenticity will only recognize one person at a time that set of instructions becomes non-fungible.
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