If you are interested in buying or trading Non Fungible Tokens (NFTs) of art media, make sure the media is being traded with the original author's permission. Despite what you may have heard, NFTs are not immune to litigation for copyright violations. NFTs and the media they are minted with are subject to all the same Intellectual Property laws that everything else is.

If the NFT was minted and traded without the author's permission or without the author licensing their work for that specific use, it is a violation of copyright. Smart contracts will not protect you in court if the contracts (often embedded within NFTs) were issued in bad faith. Unscrupulous actors often take art without permission or license, mint them into NFTs, and attach a smart contract that indicates rights granted to the purchaser of the NFT. The smart contract is legally unenforcable if the rights it is granting were never possessed by the issuer of the contract.

Don't get scammed. The author of a work of art is not responsible for you losing money (cryptocurrency or otherwise) on a fraudulent NFT sale, the person who minted it and sold it to you without permission is responsible. However, the author of a work of art is within their rights to seek legal action against both you- the purchaser- as well as the minter- the seller- of such an NFT. Be sure the media NFTs you are trading have the original author's endorsement!