CCO NFTs: with a CCO license anyone can use the NFT for commercial purposes in numerous ways
Intellectual property and copyrights are complicated phenomena with long and convoluted histories. Games Workshop, the board game company behind the wildly successful Warhammer 40,000 IP, has long disheartened its own fan base by aggressively clamping down on fan-made content across the internet. when NFTs started changing hands for hundreds of thousands of dollars, nobody was particularly thrilled to see the return of debates surrounding the IP rights of projects and collections, as they did with CryptoPunks.
The Cryptopunks is one of the earliest examples of an NFT on Ethereum and were an inspiration for the ERC-721 standard that powers most digital art and collectibles. The CryptoPunks are 10,000 uniquely generated characters. No two are exactly alike, and each one of them can be officially owned by a single person on the Ethereum blockchain. As people in the NFT ecosystem sought a way to both avoid messy copyright complications and legally empower their collectors, some projects began using something called a CCO copyright license, a legal tool that some see as a solution to these problems.
CCO copyright license:
NFT development is still in its early stages. However, as time progresses more is being discovered about NFTs. One of the more recent discussions is CCO NFTs. NFT is a form of copyright that enables creators to allow their NFTs to be owned by others. CCO NFTs can be seen as open-source Intellectual property. Projects with a CCO license mean that you aren’t even limited to your own NFT you could use any NFT in the collection, even for the logo of a new company.
CCO stands for creative commons no rights reserves. It effectively means relinquishing all copyright and similar rights that you hold in a work and dedicating those rights to the public domain. A Creative Commons license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted work. CCO means that anyone can use the NFT for commercial purposes in numerous ways without the need to give attribution to the original artist, team, or creator.
Depending on the particular NFT collection, there may be restrictions on the usage of IP on the holder’s side, and so many have started looking into NFTs that give buyers the ability to leverage and commercialize their NFTs’ artwork. Usually, when an artist, creator, or a team creates something, be it a piece of art, a song, or literature, the creator owns the rights. They can do anything with it however they please. creators and collectors are going to inadvertently give up rights if they are not familiar with basic IP law.
Most buyers believe that CCO is the license that gives them the most power over their NFTs because the creators are renouncing their claim to exclusive rights over that artwork. But the fact that the creator no longer has any say over the usage of their work, excluding moral rights, doesn’t imply that the buyer has complete control over it. Ultimately, however, and like everything else in the NFT space, CCO is not a one-size-fits-all application, and every project will have different needs.