Abstract
Resale royalty rights (also known by the French phrase, droit de suite or “right of continuation” rights) give artists a right to participate in the proceeds realized from the resale of their works. According to DuBoff, “[w]hile copyright laws give the creator of a work the right to control eproduction of the work, many visual artists do not benefit as directly as print authors do from this aspect of copyright protection.” Unlike print authors, who derive their primary economic return on a literary work through the sale of multiple copies, visual artists receive most of their economic returns from the sale of the original works they create. DuBoff states that “[r]oyalties paid to artists upon the resale of their works put visual artists on a more equal footing with print authors by giving artists the right to participate in any exploitive use of their creation and by recognizing that increases in the value of art are most often based on the artists’ on-going labors.”
Artists across the globe have had the ability to receive resale royalty rights by means of contract and covenant and often by national law and international law. Nevertheless, American artists and art enthusiasts might be excused in their ignorance of the global resale royalty situation because in the United States (and many other countries), resale royalty rights have never caught on, with exception of the State of California, and even California’s law was hounded out of existence by a series of lawsuits that ultimately declared the law to be incompatible with United States copyright law.
Congress has not acted to provide for artists’ resale royalties, and bold and valiant state efforts like California’s have failed. But the void in legal initiatives has been filled by a technological innovation: Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) with smart contracts that seek to allow resale royalty payments on every resale of NFTs. NFTs have made the calculation and payment of a resale royalty a built-in option that can be programmed into the NFT’s smart contract.
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2023
Repository Citation
Murray, Michael D., "NFTs Rescue Resale Royalties? The Wonderfully Complicated Ability of NFT Smart Contracts to Allow Resale Royalty Rights" (2023). Law Faculty Scholarly Articles. 783.
https://uknowledge.uky.edu/law_facpub/783
Notes/Citation Information
Michael D. Murray, NFTs Rescue Resale Royalties? The Wonderfully Complicated Ability of NFT Smart Contracts to Allow Resale Royalty Rights, 14 Case W. Res. J.L. Tech. & Internet 208 (2023)