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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

>> an NFT out of child sexual abuse material,

That is a really interesting question. Would that NFT be illegal to own or posess? It isnt the actual material. It could be a hash and ownership information, but the illegal material need not be in the NFT. Hashes for such material are not illegal. In fact there are databases full of such hashes in use by file hosting services to detect and remove such things. Owning an associated NFT would be like owning an NFT for "cocaine" but never being anywhere near real cocaine. It may be worthless, but i dont see how it would be actually illegal.

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Anyone that would want to own such a thing probably cares about what it points at so they're more than likely going to possess the illegal content as well. For example if you own an art NFT that is on IPFS you probably want to pin it yourself to make sure the link doesn't rot whilst you own it. Then some images are actually on-chain so the NFT and a copy of the picture exist together.

That said there is an explicit link between the NFT and the child sexual abuse material so I'd presume there is a legal case that keeping one is keeping the other. Like if you made sure your hard-drive was totally clean but kept bookmarks to abuse material.

In the example of cocaine there is no explicit link but if they could connect the NFT to a criminal enterprise then I guess there's likely some laws around profiting/handling gains from criminal activity.

I think the general principle behind the criminalisation of such images is that the sharing creates market demand for the abuse; the hash of the image isn't what gets file hosts off the hook because their moderators won't be punished for manually checking and deleting images either. On that basis, I can see someone apparently knowingly purchasing tokens symbolically representing actual acts of child sex abuse for a lot of money being in plenty of trouble even if the images never touch any of their computers.

Perhaps their best defence would be that NFTs are complete nonsense which have no tangible connection with the mutable, third-party-controlled URL endpoint they are supposedly a token representation of...

Footnote #1 suggests the author is concerned with solutions to the availability of CSAM. In this light the ownership of the NFT is actually irrelevant. Anyone can read the data in the NFT. That data will either point to CSAM or it won't. The problem, if there is one, would be with anyone with a copy of the blockchain's ledger – it would have nothing to do with the ability of anyone to update the ledger.

Yes. This is true. It also confirms that owning an NFT of a thing is not the same thing as owning the actual thing.

You are not guilty of owning CSA material until it's found on your computer.

You do not own that cat picture unless you have some documentation that transfers copyright from the author to you (like a receipt, a contract, or similar). An entry on a blockchain is not that.

Can I own something without possessing it? Clearly one can own a copyright over something without possessing a copy. So while it is illegal to possess CSA, is it illegal to own rights over it?

This issue came up a few years ago with those stolen iphone images of celebs, some of which were underage. If the photos are illegal, then DMCA takedowns might not work if one cannot own the copyright to an illegal image.

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