Andreessen Horowitz wants to fix NFT copyright with its ‘Can’t Be Evil’ license

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

The venture capital firm is trying to clean up the mess in the world ofCryptocurrencies. The company introduced a series of agreements last week that allow creators to grant partial or complete rights to their art. It is fighting a problem that has been called out by many experts.

The "Can't Be Evil" licenses are based on the CC copyright framework. The relationship between the person who created the original art and the NFT buyer is laid out in a16z's licenses.

The licenses are a legal framework for setting the rights of NFT holders, open to modification by individual projects. Bored Ape Yacht Club is one of the NFT projects that fails to do consistently. There are attempts to make a standardized NFT license, but so far, no one has seen the kind of success Creative Commons has. A16z has invested a lot of money in thecryptocurrencies.

A direct copy of the CC0 agreement is the most expansive license. There are more than one category beyond that. The buyer has exclusive rights to use the art as they please. The NFT creator retains the right to use the art as well as the non exclusive commercial rights. If the NFT is used for hate speech, there is a version of the non exclusive commercial license that gets revoked.

There are two personal use licenses that allow people to copy and display art but not use it commercially. The hate speech agreement is included in one of the other ones.

How an NFT holder can authorize other people to use the art on something like a T-shirt or TV show is one of the questions that the licenses address. New buyers don't get an NFT that's tied up in deals with other people if the subcontract is terminated on a sale. This requires creators who license someone's NFT to live with some uncertainty over its future.

If the NFT is legally sold, the contract says that copyrights only transfer if you steal someone's token.

A16z frames the copyright licenses as a more trustless version of NFT ownership, which is right in some sense, as it potentially offers more clarity over the token's legal value rather than relying on handshake deals. The old-fashioned legal system is an idea many NFT creators seem increasingly comfortable with.