YouTubers like James Stephanie "The Jimquisition" Sterling, Mark "DreamcastGuy" Shockley, Jim "Caddicarus" Caddick and Alanah "Charalanahzard" Pearce have had their likenesses turned into NFTs as part of the "Top YouTubers Collection" product sold on OpenSea.
There are a number of issues with non-fungible tokens, notwithstanding the fact that this seller has used photos of content creators without their consent in order to rake in the cash from other schmucks. The allure of, say, owning the Mona Lisa is certainly something to consider. However, the non-fungible part of the token often is proof of the artwork being hosted somewhere on the Internet. So, if that place is deleted or the server goes down, then the artwork disappears, and the NFT is no longer valuable at all. Additionally, an enormous amount of greenhouse gas emissions are generated by the blockchain, which is how NFTs are made, and artists who willingly enter the NFT market are usually losing a lot more money than they will make.
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The key word there was "willingly." Minting NFTs is the hot new thing (in spite of all of those aforementioned disadvantages) so you're bound to get some bad apples who are attempting to spin a profit from stolen art or stolen photos of real people. Spotted by Eurogamer, photos of gaming YouTubers have been found on OpenSea, a marketplace for NFTs, and the image has been lifted from their channel and comes with a link to that channel. Let's pretend that there's nothing even slightly shifty about this - why would I buy a link to a YouTube channel when I could type it into the address bar... for free.
"As gross as it is, I find it justifying - I did not consent to this, I do not want this, and it demonstrates everything I’ve said about how disrespectful and exploitative this market is," said James Stephanie Sterling on Twitter. "Shilling off a profile picture for a collection you can just make yourself on a Facebook photo album is honestly a new level of pathetic," criticised Jim Caddick.
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If you try to search for these YouTubers on OpenSea, no search results are returned, which is a happy ending to this story. Whether or not it will happen again is another question.
"OpenSea supports an open and creative ecosystem in which people have greater freedom and ownership over digital items of all kinds. One of our operating principles is to support creators and their audiences by deterring theft and plagiarism on our platform," explained OpenSea in a statement to The Gamer. "To that end, it is against our policy to sell NFTs using plagiarised content, which we regularly enforce in various ways, including delisting and in some instances, banning accounts (as was the case in this instance). We are actively expanding our efforts across customer support, trust and safety, and site integrity so we can move faster to protect and empower our community and creators."
Featured Image Credit: World Spectrum via Pexels, Alanah Pearce via TwitterTopics: Cryptocurrency, Youtube
