The NFT Bay ‘pirate’ website sparks controversy over NFTs

A critic of non-fungible tokens has created The NFT Bay, a site that mimics the Pirate Bay, to distribute NFT images in bulk. It was started by digital nomad Geoffrey Huntley to state the shortcomings of NFTs. The NFT Bay has only copied publicly available images; still, the copyright issues around this are unclear.

As Bloomberg reported, an Australian software developer Geoff Huntley says he has made thousands of non-fungible token (NFT) images freely available in an, calling it an art project that aims to show the absurdity of property-rights concepts in digital assets.

Huntley claims to have collected all the images associated with NFTs minted on the Ethereum and Solana blockchains and made them accessible – in an archive of 17TB – via an accompanying website called The NFT Bay modeled on the infamous Pirate Bay peer-to-peer search service.

Geoff’s press statements ask why he decided to do this, and the reason given is “Art.” Moreover, after discussing his background, Geoff explained a little more about the fundamental reason behind thenftbay.org. The press statements hosted on GitHub note:

“Fundamentally, I hope through thenftbay.org people learn to understand what people are buying then purchasing NFT art right now is nothing more [than] directions on how to access or download [an] image. The image is not stored on the blockchain, and the majority of images I’ve seen are hosted on web2.0 storage which is likely to end up as 404, meaning the NFT has even less value.”

“For many digital representations is > physical representation and (if/when) Twitter/TikTok (discord backed away from it) roll out the ability to display flair on a social media profile that will be a turning point,” the press statements explain. Geoff further said that the excitement over Twitter’s blue verified checkmark is a perfect example of why verifiable proof of membership could be essential. “All of this, however,” Geoff emphasized. “Could be achieved without blockchain.”

“What people dream to build with ‘web3’ is quite amazing,” The NFT Bay creator concluded. ”The underlying technology, not so much, and the greed/scamming going on is sickening. The dreams for a different future remind me of the internet in the 1990s. What’s fascinating here is the communities are very strong and can self-fund the discovery phase. Where it goes pear shape is when ‘we gotta get new blood in to [a] pump/dump.’”

NFT enthusiasts argue that the unique blockchain identifier tied with an image – such as those from popular series like Bored Ape Yacht Club, Lazy Lions, or CryptoPunks – makes each one of them scarce and valuable. However, critics have countered that digital assets are perfectly reproducible and therefore easy to pirate, as Huntley has done, and they’ve taken up the symbol of right-clicking on a mouse to signify their disapproval.

Like the right-click leads to a menu that allows users to save a copy of any NFT image, it also inspired another piece of NFT-skeptical artwork. An artist took 10,000 Lazy Lions images and turned them into a representation of a hand right-clicking a mouse.

Non-fungible tokens are dividing the industry lately. While Valve has banned NFT games from Steam, and Xbox head Phil Spencer called them exploitative, Epic Games, Ubisoft, and EA have made it clear they embrace play-to-win games. And it seems Quentin Tarantino is facing legal issues with his NFT plans.