Despite the growing popularity of NFTs, and the number of major brands and platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and YouTube getting on board with NFTs, NASA has revealed that they are not interested in their content being used as NFTs.
This is an important clarification, as NASA’s images and video content are usually not copyright protected, and are free to be used for informative and educational purposes (except for their logos, which are copyrighted and can only be used with approval by NASA).
While NFTs continue to surge full steam ahead, with popular NFT marketplaces such as OpenSea reporting record monthly volumes already for the month of January, NASA made a statement via its media-usage guidelines that it does not want any of its media content to be tokenized:
“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. It is unlawful to falsely claim copyright or other rights in NASA material.”
NASA’s logo has been seen being used for commercial purposes such as branding on clothes and other fashion items, however, they stated that they are not able to approve of any such uses when it comes to NFTs.
The newly published government guidelines also stated:
“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,”
With this being said, there are images and media that belong to NASA, which are being sold as NFTs by unknown individuals. Time will tell what will happen to these NFTs now that NASA has made it clear that they are not willing to let their media be used for these purposes.
