• 20 Minutes 

    is embarking on the world of cryptos with the auction house Piasa and tells you, in the form of a diary in several episodes, all the stages of the project.

  • Every week until October, find an episode of the “Journal d'un NFT”, a series in which we tell you how we organized the first sale of a NFT from a newspaper in France with the Piasa house.

  • In this third episode, we tell you about the first big obstacles you faced in turning a newspaper into an NFT.

    Welcome to the virtual crypto-arts odyssey.

In the last episode, I told you how the Piasa

auction

house teamed up with

20 Minutes

to auction a digital newspaper in the form of an NFT. A first in France. After having suffered many refusals from auction houses, the daring Piasa arrived as our savior and wished to follow us in this adventure by offering to organize a charity auction in October. The project is taking on an unexpected (and unforeseen) scale. But I am not at the end of my surprises.

Unlike a work of art, many feathers participate in the creation of a journal every day.

You might think that doesn't change anything, but it complicates our task enormously.

To sell this NFT, you have to make sure that the authors of the issue agree to assign their copyright.

Basically, they have to agree not to collect anything on the occasion of this sale (and on all subsequent sales, if there are any) to avoid me further difficulties.

Luckily, three journalists signed on for this six-page issue.

I should rally them to my cause easily (I hope).

A photo, a smart contract and 10,000 euros in the teeth

To make it short (and avoid getting lost right away), copyright can be broken down into two types of rights: exploitation rights and moral rights (right to the name, right to the authorship of the work , right to deny one's work…). For the creation of the NFT, I focus on the exploitation part, in particular the reproduction right which authorizes to publish an article on a website, for example. In a journal, as you know, there is the written part and the illustrations. If the

20 Minute

s

journalists

are generous, things are getting worse in terms of photo agencies.

And it does not magnify, a photo is problematic. We hold an exploitation right for the majority of the photos used, but the photojournalism agency Sipa asks for guarantees. We have to make sure "that if the work is sold several times [after the first sale], even several years after, the rights are paid back at each sale," Sipa wrote in an email. It seems technically difficult to consider paying copyright for a single photo. I contact Me Bérénice Ferrand, specialist in intellectual property law and president of Avocap 2.2 to dissect this problem in the context of the creation of an NFT.

According to the lawyer, the best solution would be to specify in a smart contract, which will be deployed on the blockchain, the conditions for granting copyright and neighboring rights to each participant. A smart contract makes it possible to define all the legal rules when the digital token is created. "The NFT carries with it all the information of the smart contract, related to the people who participated, to the creation of the work, to the date of publication, etc.", explains Me Ferrand. Thus, even if the

20 Minutes

NFT

is sold in fifteen years, it will include all this information: the journalists who participated and waived their copyright, the right to use the photos, the date of the broadcast of the NFT ...

First thing, we'll have to change the problematic Sipa photo, which bothers me a bit.

We have to modify the original journal and that's a shame.

Second thing, if I want a personalized NFT with a smart contract, I can no longer go through a large platform like Rarible to create the token.

I have to hire a developer specializing in blockchains.

Optimistic (and ignorant), I say to myself “banco, let's go”.

But if it was that simple, it wouldn't be funny.

Where are the blockchain developers?

I'm checking with Claire Balva, blockchain and crypto director at KPMG France, whom I had already interviewed for a previous article, to find a “tech” capable of helping me. She explains to me that developing a personalized NFT, with a smart contract, is feasible but extremely expensive. It takes 10,000 euros, because specialized blockchain developers are very rare. A drop of sweat begins to bead on my forehead. Above all, it is necessary to secure the token to avoid hacking. Recall that several NFT attacks, which allowed the victim's Metamask wallet to be siphoned off using a corrupted file, have been recorded in the specialized press in recent months. We will have to find another solution.

There is no question of taking a risk on the security of the token, especially in the context of a charitable auction. One corrupt line of code and the whole project collapses. Honestly, in front of all these obstacles, the idea of ​​abandoning the project is stuck in my head. The newspaper cannot spend 10,000 euros for the creation of an NFT, especially since we are not sure that it will find a buyer at that price… There is only one option left: to create it as planned on a secure platform like Rarible and replace the smart contract with a traditional contract on a loose leaf. I'm a little disappointed that for technical reasons I can't go through with this idea, but the most important thing is to conduct the auction. Moral of the story: France is sorely lacking in blockchain skills.

In the next episode, we tell you why we chose to donate the money from the auction to the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), whose security fund is particularly in the news with the crisis in Afghanistan.

See you next week, dear crypto-addicts.

  • Culture

  • Innovation

  • Auction

  • Virtual currency

  • NFT

  • Future (s)

  • Newspaper