The UK is at risk of misregulating NFTs, says Mintable CEO.

The UK government is at risk of regulating non-fungible tokens (NFTs) in a way that doesn't fit the true nature of the startup's technology, says Minttable CEO and founder Zach Burke.

In an interview with Cointelegraph, Burke said he believes a recent report from a UK parliamentary committee greatly overstates the role NFTs play in copyright infringement and fails to recognize that they are not just dynamic digital images.

“NFTs are in a transition phase where they're moving away from the speculative growth of PFPs, and now it's getting into the utilities of brands that are applying NFTs to a variety of different things,” Burks explained.

In an October 11 report, the Culture, Media and Sport Committee urged the government to take action to protect artists and content creators from copyright infringement related to NFTs.

NFT marketplaces need to do more to address the level of copyright infringement on their platforms.

We published our report on “NFTs and the Blockchain: Risks to Sports and Culture”.

Find out more: our report: pic.twitter.com/GTbtOJCM8m

— Culture, Media and Sport Committee (@CommonsCMS) October 11, 2023

Burks acknowledges that protecting artists' copyrights and intellectual property rights is extremely important, adding that Mintable uses its own IP protection algorithm to prevent defamation on the platform.

However, he explained that while these issues should be a priority for all NFT platforms, they are not exactly NFT-specific concerns.

“These problems are with the Internet, not NFTs.”

“Regulators say, ‘Now NFTs are being used for copyright infringement.' Well yes, so is WordPress. So is YouTube. So is Spotify,” he said. “And how do you combat that? Well, you have big, very advanced companies like Google that are working on this.

“They have hundreds of billions of dollars, and they can't solve the problem of fighting copyright on YouTube. This problem is not out of thin air as NFTs have been created.

Burkes, who writes privately with UK government officials on NFT every week, said that while NFT platforms should do their best to protect artists, it falls to regulators to take a more negative view of NFTs in general.

It was a great time to speak at the 40th International Symposium on Economic Crime at the University of Cambridge in England!

I learned a lot, met some amazing people, and hopefully more people listened to my panels about NFTs and the blockchain space! pic.twitter.com/txExSVqTIb

— Zach Burks (@ZachSpaded) September 14, 2023

“There are many ways you can use NFTs, whether it's for your car records, your property records, a bank settlement document, a backup layer, an entire supply chain system or a biofuel company,” he said.

“It is not just a work of art or a financial instrument. […] NFT is an effective website.

“If my website is used to sell books, I will be governed by the rules for selling books. If I sell medicine on my website, you don't need new rules. I'm still selling medicine, right?” he said laughing.

In Burks's view, NFTs are a technology that can perform a wide variety of functions, and the committee's disclosure of them as a piece of digital art could be a significant barrier to publicizing the technology's true benefits.

” of [committee] The government says it should apply the EU's 17 copyright directive to NFTs, which is really bad because it's a broad umbrella.

Related: NFTs aren't dead — they're dying.

In the report, the committee noted that the “most serious issue” raised by NFTs is the risk to artists' intellectual property rights in the case of easy and simple mining of tokens. He proposed to be guided by a relatively narrow copyright directive: Article 17 of the EU Copyright Directive.

“When you say all NFTs should have this one piece of regulatory coverage, that's the equivalent of saying, ‘We need one law covering this technology,' which started with the Edison bulb. Now we're dealing with Tesla,” Burke said.

“So we have to be very careful that what we look at as a system for NFTs are these kinds of comprehensive regulatory frameworks, as opposed to looking at NFTs for what they really are.”

Finally, Burke believes the UK government could take some notes from regulators in Singapore, where the government judges NFTs based on their specific use cases.

“The regulators in Singapore look at what the NFT actually is, and then they go from there,” he explained. “Say you have an NFT of Tesla stock. Well, that's security. Oh, is this an NFT of a bag of cocaine that facilitates drug sales? Then they control the way they take illegal drugs.

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