NFTs, Lil Nas & Palantir

Happy Monday! In the interests of it being a Bank Holiday, we’re keeping it short and sweet this week with one trend story and two news stories.

A little over a month ago, I spent the weekend holed up in my room writing about how the NFT craze is good for law.

Since then, the craze has intensified in ways that are both very weird and very cool. Peel back the hype and one constant remains: legal implications are still the crux of the NFT trend.

Why? Crypto laws are like spaghetti code: loose, slippery, undefined. This leaves blind spots in the NFT universe that haven’t been plugged yet. Some examples, courtesy of ExtraCrunch:

a) It’s unclear how financial sanctions relate to NFTs. BitGo and BitPay were fined for allowing interactions in Iran and Cuba - jurisdictions where America forbids transactions.

b) Is meme-ified work fair game? If I screenshot someone else’s art, make an NFT out of it, and sell it - it feels like I’m breaking copyright laws, but there’s no precedent that explicitly says I am.

Even if there was, the likelihood of artists lawyering up is pretty low. Case in point: cartoonist Matt Furie asked a law firm to help him pro bono when his Pepe frog meme was hijacked by the alt-right.

c) Unreliable blockchains can stunt value. There’s a value imbalance between NFTs and Ethereum, the blockchain NFTs exist on.

This imbalance incentivises miners to undo or block transactions. There are legal precedents for assets being stolen from a centralized exchange, but there’s no precedent for what happens if the underlying blockchain itself gets manipulated.

There’s good and bad here.

Bonus takeaway: NFTs have been upgraded from fringe conversation to the topic of most Clubhouse rooms, which means the bubble is about to pop. DAOs are the next big thing.

Nike has filed a trademark suit against streetwear brand MSCHF for releasing blood-infused ‘Satan Shoes’.

The backstory. Last Monday, MSCHF teamed up with rapper Lil Nas X to release 666 pairs of ‘Satan Shoes’ - customized Nike Air Max 97’s that are embellished with a pentagram and infused with a drop of human blood.

Turns out Nike doesn’t appreciate being associated with human blood and the devil. In court filings, Nike:

The other side. Unfazed, MSCHF says the shoes are Banksy-esque works of social commentary intended “to criticize the ever-popular ‘collab culture,’ where brands like Nike collaborate with anyone willing to make a splash.”

MSCHF does this kind of thing a lot.

The only potential obstacle standing in the way of a Nike win here is that is didn’t sue MSCHF over its Jesus shoes. Professor Alexandra Roberts thinks Nike can clear this obstacle:

P.S. you’re not the only one wondering how MSCHF got enough human blood to support six hundred shoes.

Coolcoolcool.

A secret £23m NHS deal with Palantir, a CIA-backed data firm, has been paused following a lawsuit by Open Democracy.

The backstory. The NHS and Palantir cosied up in March 2020 for a short-term project to analyse a “datastore” of health information following the pandemic.

In December, the NHS extended Palantir’s contract for two years for matters “far beyond” Covid - including Brexit and general government business.

Now… the government has pulled a U-turn, promising not to extend Palantir’s contract without consulting the public via a Data Protection Impact Assessment first.

The pandemic has generated vast amounts of data, which form the crux of our scientific response against the virus. This data is by its very nature highly sensitive, personal medical information that people - surprisingly - don’t want in the hands of an American ‘spy tech’ company with a controversial rap sheet.

Zoom out. Palantir has been a supplier to the public sector since waaaay before 2020.