Creators Take Control: How NFTs Revolutionize Art, Business, and Entertainment – Blockchain Technology, Digital Ownership, and the Token Economy

by Edward Lee

A leading legal scholar offers a compelling new theory to explain the meteoric rise of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and their impact on art, business, entertainment, and society, and explains how they are revolutionizing our understanding of ownership. If you buy an NFT, do you own anything? Critics say no. Then why are people spending so much money to own them—to the tune of $27 billion in 2021? And why are big businesses and venture capital firms investing hundreds of millions to develop NFTs for people’s use in the metaverse, a purely imaginary world? In Creators Take Control , Edward Lee offers a compelling new theory he calls “Tokenism” that answers these perplexing questions. Using vivid examples, Lee lucidly explains how NFTs operate—and how they fundamentally change our understanding of ownership. Tokenism is an artistic, cultural, and technological movement that creates value in a new kind of ownership of a new type of property—symbolized by a virtual token—through a process of technological abstraction and artificial scarcity effectuated by NFTs. Ownership becomes virtual. What Cubism did in radically changing the twentieth-century perspective of creating and viewing art through cubes, Tokenism does today in altering our perspective of owning art and other things through tokens. Both movements radically reimagine what’s possible. Creators and businesses have seized upon this profound transformation. In a short time, they have developed a new market for digital art, important new rights for creators, innovative business models based on decentralized collaboration, and a new type of interactive ownership that enables identity, community, and patronage through NFTs. These innovations are just the start of revolutionary changes to society. Lee shows how NFTs create a new form of decentralized intellectual property, or De-IP. Comparable to the movement to decentralized finance (DeFi), De-IP empowers creators to take control of their artistic productions and livelihood. Lee’s intellectual tour de force is filled with practical insights—and hope—for fostering creativity and a Virtual Renaissance for the ages.

400 pages, Hardcover

First published March 28, 2023

About the author

Edward Lee is a leading legal expert on NFTs and intellectual property. He is a professor of law and co-director of Illinois Tech Chicago-Kent College of Law’s Center for Design, Law, and Technology, the first U.S. institution devoted to research of creativity, technology, design, and the law. His website, nouNFT.com, analyzes the latest developments in NFTs. He founded The Free Internet Project, a nonprofit whose mission is to protect Internet freedoms. He is a former contributor to the Huffington Post. His work has been featured in outlets such as the Washington Post and Billboard. He worked on public interest litigation as an attorney for Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society.

Reviews

[Jeff · Rating 2 out of 5]

About three-quarters away through this, I realized that I would gain very little understanding of NFTs and it's then the author really starts to go off the rails, when he claims NFTs will empower the racially marginalized and the gender ambiguous. He talks about the impact of cryptocurrency on climate and hate-speech online and it basically degenerates in a "woke" mess that lacks any coherent focus.

If you a baby-boomer, prepare to be insulted throughout, e.g.:
“U.S. employers know that they’ll face difficulties in recruiting Millennials and Gen Zs if the company is not committed to diversity and inclusion. These numbers reflect, in part, the greater diversity of America: Gen Zs and Millennials are the most racially and ethnically diverse generations in U.S. history. These numbers suggest that younger generations are both more socially aware and smarter.”

Smarter? I guess he hasn't seen the research showing the steady decline in IQs in the generations that follow the baby boomers. Those generations know appallingly little about history and so what they think they know about social awareness is flawed at best and nonsensical at worse.

Another idiotic quote:
“Gen Zs and Millennials also showed much higher percentages (62 and 61, respectively) in endorsing the view that increasing racial and ethnic diversity is good for society. Distressingly, only 48 percent of Boomers agreed. High percentages of Millennials and Gen Zs also considered a prospective employer’s diversity and inclusion an important factor in seeking jobs, according to other surveys.”

I can't imagine anyone over the age of 60 not objecting to the use of the word “increasing” in this context, which implies a forced remedy that disregards merit. My generation believes in equality of opportunity over a enforced equality of outcome.

[Shirley Kingery · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a must read for those who would like an introduction to the new-fangled, highly complex and volatile world of NFT's (including a basic background of cryptocurrency, as the two go hand-in-hand for the most part). If you are like me, and not of the Gen-Z or Millenial designation, chances are that this subject causes you a great deal of confusion, and you are either poorly or completely uninformed on the topic. In that case, this book is going to give you a solid basic understanding of NFT's (and cryptocurrency), and open the topic up for you to learn more about it, keep up with the latest developments and make your own informed decisions about it.

Creators Take Control is an invaluable compendium on the topic of NFT's and belongs on the bookshelves of those wanting to educate themselves on this up and coming technology that looks to be more and more a part of daily life in the (present and) future. It also gives us a substantial look at the development of Web 3 and the Metaverse and provides some inspiration and hope that it will not suffer the same negative effects that are so overwhelming on Web 2; such as the autocratic rule of Facebook and Twitter (X) and surveillance capitalism (I love this term!).

Edward Lee has has an extensive background in law, technology and NFT/cryptocurrency and a very impressive resume. Creators Take Control is very well written in an easy to understand manner and the numerous pages of copious notes full of reliable and verifiable sources is nothing short of amazing.

[Carol Zurita · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic explanations and details of the main NFT case studies of 2021.
Insights on the various uses of tokenisation.
I have recommended my clients who are independent artists seeking to innovative their music and branding.