The music industry can be incredibly litigious and it’s no wonder that an NFT website which traded music in a questionable manner didn’t last all that long.
The website in question is HitPiece which stoked the ire of the music industry last week. The website claimed to sell one-of-one NFTs of songs but it also didn’t have permission to sell many of the songs it was selling. As artists began speaking out, HitPiece went offline offering a rather limp statement via its Twitter profile.
“Clearly we have struck a nerve and are very eager to create the ideal experience for music fans. To be clear, artists get paid when digital goods are sold on HitPiece. Like all beta products, we are continuing to listen to all user feedback and are committed to evolving the product to fit the needs of the artists, labels and fans alike,” reads the statement.
https://twitter.com/joinhitpiece/status/1488715576973283330
While artists were upset, the creators of HitPiece also upset the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) enough for it to send the website a letter of demand. The letter demands that the website stop infringing on artist’s intellectual property, a complete list of site activities and revenues to date as well as an account of all NFTs and artwork that have been auctioned off.
“HitPiece appears to be little more than a scam operation designed to trade on fans’ love of music and desire to connect more closely with artists, using buzzwords and jargon to gloss over their complete failure to obtain necessary rights. Fans were led to believe they were purchasing an NFT genuinely associated with an artist and their work when that was not at all the case,” chief legal officer at RIAA, Ken Doroshow said in a statement.
The association goes on to say that, while HitPiece is offline, it wants the information listed in the letter of demand to prevent something like this from happening again.
“While the operators appear to have taken the main HitPiece site offline for now, this move was necessary to ensure a fair accounting for the harm HitPiece and its operators have already done and to ensure that this site or copycats don’t simply resume their scams under another name,” said Doroshow.
RIAA held no punches addressing the creators of HitPiece, pointing out that, according to HitPiece’s legal team, the purchase of an NFT didn’t actually include the sound recording. The senior vice president of litigation at RIAA, Jared Freedman said, “our clients’ outright theft of these valuable intellectual property rights is as outrageous as it is brazen”.
The sad reality is that many NFTs make use of content that isn’t owned by the person or organisation minting the NFT.
This is an issue which has been raised more than once throughout the lifetime of NFTs and given the decentralised nature of the tokens, identifying which content is original and which is simply just a copy that has been minted without permission is incredibly tough.
One thing we’re certain of is that this won’t be the last time NFT’s stoke the ire of oversight bodies.
[Image – CC 0 Pixabay]
