Author: Tolga Sevinir
Introduction
The right to property, which is one of the concepts and values underlying the liberal economic and legal system, regulates the ownership relationship between the person and goods. The scope of the term “goods,” which is the subject of the concept of property, expanded in the 17th century with the increased production of intellectual property which occurred along with developments in technology. Thus, the concept of intellectual property was born.
Today, intellectual property refers to the property right of people to all kinds of intellectual output. Intellectual activity is sufficient for the existence of this right, and there is no need for it to take on a material form, such as a book, or to be registered in a registry, as with trademarks. The fact that intellectual property can exist without the need for any registration creates difficulties in preventing infringements against intellectual property and proving ownership. Because people do not have to register their intellectual output in order to establish a property right to their intellectual products, it is not easy to prove that a particular person is the first to produce the idea or work, in the case of any alleged theft of those ideas and works. In national and international practice, people have used a wide variety of methods to prove that they are the owners of their intellectual products. Notary registration, sending e-mails, keeping an electronic record, creating a time stamp, reporting the work to professional associations are the leading ones, and each of them can be considered valid in terms of evidence law.
NFTs and the Their Evidence Function for Intellectual Property Ownership
Non-Fungible Tokens – better known as NFTs – have begun to radically change many transactions in our lives. One of the areas where this radical change is most intense is in digital artwork and proof functions. As a matter of fact, since, NFTs work on the blockchain and cannot be copied or reproduced, they reveal ownership with high reliability. The creation of digital artwork or an intellectual product in the digital environment as an NFT gives it an unalterable and non-replicable digital identity and gives its owner an extremely powerful evidentiary tool. NFTs have created such strong confidence in the markets that many digital artworks are traded as NFTs today. In fact, Mike Winkelmann (better known as “Beeple”) created an NFT piece called “Everydays: The First 5000 Days” which was sold for a remarkable $69.3 Million.
