What Can the Artist and Community Do when Facing a Hostile Production Team
We are writing this in support of Suzie, creator of Super Shiba Club, and any creator or community facing similar situation. The SSC team essentially did a hostile takeover of the project after internal disagreement. Context here: https://twitter.com/bryanbrinkman/status/1458788536237400064 , and here: https://twitter.com/SuperShibaClub/status/1458771721427718144
The Synergy within a NFT Team
For majority of the generative NFT projects out there, it takes a team to bring the idea to fruition. It includes the artist, smart contract developer, the marketing / community manager and mod.
It is an unfortunate truth that artists are often at the shorter end of the stick, when it comes to a fair distribution of the mint proceeds. Not only that, because the smart contract is deployed by the developer, it means that the developer holds an overwhelming power over the artist. Because as the owner of the smart contract, the developer is able to pretty much do whatever they want, including siphoning all the mint proceeds, transfer the ownership of the contract to someone else, etc.
In the case of Super Shiba Club, the entire team seemed to have colluded, and totally abandoned the artist, along with the intellectual property (IP) rights of the artist.
Legal Recourse? Don't Think So
IP is a difficult subject. Different jurisdiction applies IP differently. When you have a cross-border team, it complicates things even further.
And then it comes with the burden of financial commitment to see through the legal action, the mental and psychological stress to produce proof and testify.
Also adding on to the fact that NFT and digital ownership is still in its nascent stage, countries are still figuring out rules and regulations within the crypto and NFT space. Pursuing a legal recourse if definitely a long and vicious process, further exacerbating the aforementioned burden.
Because of these factors, recovering the rightful IP ownership for the artist via traditional legal system has a near 0% chance (not legally trained, not legal advise).
The Consequence of Inaction
BUT! The artist cannot take a passive stance, especially if the project has seen successes. Because with every single day that the artist loses access to his or her project, the artist is losing out on secondary market sales royalties, and also the project's brand and community deteriorates as time goes by.
A Solution
So then what can an artist, and the community that rallies behind the artist do? I think the most sensible thing to do is to create a new smart contract, which old token holders can trade in the old token, in exchange for a new token issued with the new contract. During this process, the old tokens received by the new contract will also be burned. A step-by-step process would be something like this:
Trusted dev creates new smart contract
Old token holders can interact with the new smart contract to transfer in their old NFT
When the new smart contract receives the old NFT, it will issue a new NFT with the exact same underlying asset and metadata under the new smart contract
Thereafter, the new smart contract will send the old NFT received to a burner address.
The caveat to this is that it will require a substantial amount of support from the community, and also the community must be willing to spend some gas fee to interact with the new smart contract.
While it takes time to establish trust with a new developer (especially just after a traumatic experience), it is definitely faster compared to a legal action.
The Actual Proper Solution
We are working with amazing blockchain technology. Such incident should not have happened. This is especially so after the finalisation of EIP-2981: NFT Royalty Standard, over a year go.
Ideally, secondary royalty percentages should be decided, and agreed upon by the project team, and set in stone within the smart contract. Most contract does not do that. Because at the time of writing this, not a single marketplace adopts the EIP-2981 standard.
The consequence of this is that the wallet that has the ownership of the smart contract will be the wallet that receives the secondary marketplace royalty. This is especially concerning given the fact that the largest NFT marketplace, Opensea, has yet to adopt EIP-2981.
Closing Words
We hope that our humble thoughts can help any creator facing the similar situation. And we hope as the NFT space matures, we will see less of such nonsense.
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