Share your art with Āto
Āto allows you to create a state-of-the-art personalized IP license to go with your NFT. The app is live on Polygon. We’re calling on all artists to try it out!
The problem we solve
When you mint an NFT without any license attached to it, you don’t transfer any specific rights over your artwork. The IP rights just remain yours. The future buyers of your NFT will own a pointer to your artwork, not the artwork itself. It’s a problem because people are not necessarily aware of that. It can lead to all sorts of lawsuits and slow down the development of Web3.
Āto fixes that: you can now choose very precisely the rights that are ‘injected’ into your NFT using our web app. These rights are assigned to the owner of the NFT and that changes everything because now people actually know what they’re buying when they buy your NFT.
What’s an NFT?
As a reminder, an NFT is a unique digital object that can be transferred from a wallet to another. This object is basically defined by three things:
- an ID
- a smart contract address
- a network (i.e. a blockchain)
We’re using the ERC-721 set of smart contracts provided by Open Zeppelin. Here’s our own Github repository. With Āto you can mint on Polygon and we’ll soon support several different networks.
As an artist, it’s up to you to decide how you want to share your art.
You can choose to assign a certain number of rights over a given artwork. For example, you can allow the owner of the NFT to adapt your artwork, to use it as a profile picture, or to exhibit it in the most select fine art gallery of the open metaverse.
We’re combining the best available Web3 techniques AND the state-of-the-art legal innovation to give artists and content creators the capacity to assign the IP rights they want to the future owner of their NFT. It’s the very first time that IP rights can be transferred so easily. You can keep in mind that these brand new features may impact the price of the NFT you want to sell.
This is how Āto works:
When you click on the button, the app makes a pdf file in which all the rights you selected are written in French, English (and Chinese in v0.3.5), and the hash of this file is added to the NFT metadata. Same process for the media file. Then the hash of the metadata is hardcoded in the ERC-721 smart contract that you deploy to the blockchain. All these files are stored in a decentralized and permanent way, meaning that they’ll always be accessible whatever happens to Āto.
Now that you have your NFT on your wallet, you can sell it on OpenSea or any other marketplace. You have protected your artwork and assigned rights to the future holder of this NFT. By the way, they’re applicable in the 179 countries who signed the Berne convention.
Resale rights
When you publish your artwork with Āto, you can also choose which resale rights percentage you want to get each time your NFT is resold. This pourcentage is written:
- in the legal contract,
- in the metadata,
- AND in the smart contract.
We implemented the EIP-2981, which is a standard proposal that is still in discussion. If the marketplace supports this standard, you automatically get a percentage of the sale price. We’re calling every NFT marketplaces to support it. We believe that standardization is essential, that’s why we put a lot of effort to comply to these emerging standards as we design any of our products.
A validated approach
This year in October, we had the very first NFT auction sale validated by institutional actors, including the ADAGP (Association Collecting Payment of Visual Artists’ Rights) and the CVV (French Auction House Authority).
Matthieu Quiniou and myself have spent countless hours to ‘sync’ the tech and legal parts together so that our product fits the needs of the many, so the validation of our legal approach was an important milestone for us.
We’re now a team of six and we’re hiring. It is incredibly exciting to work at building the foundations of Web3. As the whole industry is gaining in maturity, we’re very proud to solve tricky legal issues for everyone in the community and beyond.
Before you leave, have a look at Sha22's series of NFTs. We’re absolute fans!
We’re also working with marketplaces, galleries and auction houses to strengthen the legal side of their projects. We’re about to release an API to make the integration easy for everyone. You can contact us or schedule a call if you’re interested.
Whoever you are, feel free to join us on Discord, Twitter or LinkedIn. Happy new year! 2022 will be great!
Photo by Patrick Hodskins.
