A certain artist named Aja Trier has had her work stolen before, but in one case, her art was ripped off on a much larger scale. The artist once woke up with an alert in her inbox notifying her that her viral "Vincent Van Gogh-style paintings" had been turned into 86K NFTs.
Artist Found Her Work Stolen and Sold as 86K NFTs
According to The Verge, Trier told them that although she had been able to observe other artists having to deal with NFT theft, it was the first time for her to see the artwork being stolen to that extent. To add, she noted that other people also said that they had not seen stolen artwork at that scale.
Without her knowledge, Trier's work was listed on OpenSea without her knowing it. As per the publication, ever since the existence of NFTs, artists have all been complaining about having their work stolen by scammers and minted on the blockchain.
86 thousand times people have stolen my art and listed them on @opensea and they even had the gall to make a collection like a giant middle finger to my IP rights. Wtf?#nft #arttheft #opensea #infringement #nftcommunity pic.twitter.com/LY5Jxb2N2r
— Aja Trier (@AjaArt) January 5, 2022
OpenSea Announced Stolen Collection Raised $300 Million at a $13.3 Billion Valuation
Artists, however, are saying that the overall problem is getting even more out of hand with the platform earning billions of dollars in sales. When Trier found out that her work was stolen, the platform, OpenSea, even announced that it was able to raise "$300 million at a whopping $13.3 billion valuation" as per an article by The New York Times.
The problem has reportedly gone worse as The Verge notes that there are now scalping bots that go through artists' online galleries, or even Google Image keyword searches, then create collections paired with auto-generated texts which are to be listed on OpenSea.
How Scammers and Art Thieves Use OpenSea to Sell NFTs
As per NFTTheft, however, the incident is actually no accident as OpenSea "allows the creation of NFTs using "lazy minting" where people can list NFTs for sale even without having to write them to the blockchain.
OpenSea does not require sellers to pay fees until the actual sale of the NFT which allows scammers to list as many stolen items as possible. With that, DeviantArt previously introduced Protect which is an "image recognition tool" that notifies certain users of NFT marketplace copyright infringements which leads to "a flood of matches."
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Aja Trier Filed Takedown Requests for All 86K NFTs
Once artists find out about the thefts, however, it all falls into their hands to have the listings removed. Trier filed "takedown requests under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act" or DMCA after they got alerts early this year.
Trier, however, found out that it would still take weeks in order for her to be able to "complete a separate request for each of tens of thousands of fraudulent listings" which is required by OpenSea.
NFTTheft noted that OpenSea has become less responsive despite artists becoming starting to voice out even more because of Protect.
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Written by Urian B.
