NFTCN’s parent company, BigVerse has been held guilty by a court in China’s eastern city of Hangzhou for letting a user mine NFTs from stolen artwork.
In spite of Chinese regulators’ abhorrence for cryptocurrency trading and mining activities, the NFT digital art market has been quietly flourishing.
Up to this point, the nation has allowed NFTs but restricted people from trading them. Tech giants like Alibaba, Tencent, and JD in China, have concocted their own drives that permit clients to purchase and collect NFTs. In any case, they are barred from trading or reselling their purchases.
Coming back to the incident, the judgment by the court has accused BigVerse of not ensuring the identity of the user matched with the NFTs he was minting nor did they check for the rightful owner of the artwork.
As per South China Morning Post, NFTCN is guilty of violating the owner’s right “to disseminate works through information networks.” A Shenzhen-based company, Qice, filed a lawsuit against BigVerse. As per the lawsuit, the marketplace listed a non-fungible token related to the said artwork. It featured a piece by artist Ma Qianli, which was a cartoon tiger receiving a vaccine shot.
The cartoon picture was sold to an unknown user for $137. BigVerse has been ordered by the court to pay Qice a fine of $611, to compensate for the loss. The marketplace must also stop the NFT from circulating further by sending it to an eater address (a crypto wallet without a private key).