Andreessen Horowitz Introduces First NFT-Specific Licenses; Why is this crucial?

Miles Jennings and Chris Dixon, general counsel and general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, shared a groundbreaking technical concept designed to allow Web3 content producers and owners to hardcode IP rights into their releases.

Andreessen Horowitz is changing the narrative in Web3 IP management with the “Can’t Be Evil” tool.

In their detailed blog post, the authors admitted that non-fungible tokens are usually issued with either a CC license, custom legal terms, or even omitted licenses.

1/ Today we are excited to launch a series of open source “Can’t be Evil” NFT licenses. Designed specifically for NFTs, these licenses were inspired by more than 20 years of Creative Commons work.

— miles jennings (@milesjennings) 31 August 2022

As the segment becomes more and more mature, this confusing status quo becomes a roadblock to the adoption and fair monetization of NFT technology. That’s why the Andreessen Horowitz team decided to create a set of open source licenses specifically for the NFT segment and called “Can’t be Evil.”

This package is inspired by Creative Commons and its role in the development of IP management. Basically, new licenses are designed to protect IP rights, to provide NFT holders with a baseline of clear and irrevocable rights and to help digital content creators and commissioners unlock the economic potential of their products.

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The slogan “Can’t Be Evil” is set to reflect the paradigm of blockchains creating a trustless basis for interaction between Internet users, without the need for human intervention.

Pioneering on-chain licenses for tokenized content

The first release of licenses contains mechanisms for six licensing regimes – from exclusive commercial rights to CC0 1.0 Universal. All of them are completely open source and available in a16z’s GitHub.

Since no toolkit can reflect the full range of possible use cases, the new toolkit is flexible and can be tweaked by community enthusiasts. a16z distributed the codebase of Arweave, a decentralized data storage ecosystem.

Technically, the licensing mode can be changed with two entries in a single CantBeEvil.sol file. As such, this release pushes the barriers to legal use of NFTs and sets more comprehensible “rules of the game” for participants in this market.