Quick take:
- NASA has mentioned NFTs in its media usage guidelines and regulations for merchandising requests.
- NASA does not wish for its media content to be tokenised.
- NFTs are not consistent with the categories of products the Agency is approved to merchandise.
WIth intellectual property rights being an ongoing issue in the NFT space, NASA has come out to make its stance clear — it strictly forbids the use of its imagery for NFT purposes.
In a detailed media usage guidelines and regulations for merchandising requests published on the government agency’s site, NASA states that the imagery, audio recordings and videos that have been made available to the public may not be used for NFTs, the reason being that they are for educational and informational purposes in accordance with NASA guidelines.
“Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) are, in essence, digital tokens owned by someone as a “one of a kind” digital asset. NASA does not wish for its images to be used for these purposes,” the media guideline states.
In NASA’s strict regulations for merchandising requests, the space agency stated that “NASA is not approving any merchandising applications involving Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), as they are not consistent with the categories of products the Agency is approved to merchandise.”
NASA’s branding, imagery and data have previously been used in NFTs.
In April last year, creative studio and watchmaker Anicorn Watches released a NASA-branded NFT artwork depicting a vacuum-packed rotating disc with the space agency’s logo on it. Sold on Rarible for $40,129.65, the NFT can be used to redeem a “secret timepiece” designed by NASA logo creator Richard Danne.
On Jan 20, it was reported that Mars4, a metaverse project that combines NFTs, Crypto and an immersive survival game, raised over $250,000 in one day through the NFT sale. Its metaverse NFTs consist of geographically-exact plots of land on Mars created using data from NASA.
NASA has not commented on these NFT projects and it’s not known whether their creators will face any legal repercussions.
Stay up to date:
