Jay-Z's NFT Feud Spotlights Legal Peril in Hot Investment Trend

As a young rapper, Jay-Z once teamed up with Damon Dash to sell CDs of his music out of a car in the Brooklyn projects. Today, the co-founders of Roc-A-Fella Records are embroiled in a legal fight involving one of the most cutting-edge investments: non-fungible tokens. From a report: The lawsuit is among a flurry involving NFTs as U.S. courts begin to grapple with the novel legal issues surrounding ownership and regulation of the assets, which have recently exploded in value. More than half a dozen suits citing NFTs have been filed in federal courts alone since the start of 2020, as monthly trading volume in the world's biggest NFT marketplace, OpenSea, soared from $8 million six months ago to more than $1 billion in August.

The dispute began in June, when Roc-A-Fella sued Dash, seeking to stop him from auctioning off the copyright to Jay-Z's debut album, Reasonable Doubt, as an NFT, which represents ownership of a digital object on a blockchain. Roc-A-Fella says that while Dash holds a one-third stake in the company, it owns the album itself, and he has no legal right to sell the NFT. The Jay-Z suit should serve as a warning to buyers and sellers of NFTs to make sure both sides know exactly what's being sold, said Christopher A. Cole, a partner with Crowell & Moring LLP in Washington. 'They need to be very careful up front, when the NFT is created, to ensure that it's a valid instrument and the creators had the rights they needed to what's being sold, so that it's not attacked down the road,' Cole said. More litigation involving NFTs is likely, from lawsuits on behalf of consumers who didn't understand the nature of the rights they were acquiring to government enforcement actions to protect them, said Pratin Vallabhaneni, a partner with White & Case in Washington.

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