Venture capital giant Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) is launching a new licensing system for non-fungible tokens NFT to address the current challenges and ambiguities surrounding the use of collectible crypto-objects.
Andreessen Horowitz or a16z is a U.S.-based venture capital firm founded in 2009 by two co-founders, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, who took the fund after their names. In the beginning, a16z aggressively invested in early-stage startups with bold technology ideas.
In addition to investments in crypto over the past few years, a16z’s investments include gaming, social media, education, computer science, and more. As of August 2021, a16z would have $18.8 billion in assets under management (not just crypto assets).
Marc Andreessen is considered by many to be a living legend in Silicon Valley. He is widely regarded as the father of the modern web browser.
a16z hopes to democratize access to high-quality licenses
The company designed the licenses specifically for non-fungible tokens (NFT) and is inspired by the work of Creative Commons.
According to the official press release, the community can freely use these licenses, which have certain goals in mind. These include helping NFT creators protect or release their intellectual property (IP) rights and providing NFT owners with an “irrevocable, enforceable and easy-to-understand” rights base.
Some of these CC licenses allow the public to share, remix and reuse creations.
Helping creators, space holders, as well as their respective communities, to “unlock the creative and economic potential of their projects with a clear understanding of the IP framework in which they can work” is yet another key area of focus for the licenses.
“Many NFT projects omit licenses altogether, or write licenses that create more ambiguity than they resolve. Some loopholes in copyright law have led to significant confusion around NFT licenses, as well as a number of other legal problems.
The investment firm says it worked with leading intellectual property lawyers to design six types of NFT licenses that are now available on GitHub.
By making the licenses easy (and free) to integrate, we hope to democratize access to high-quality licenses and encourage standardization in the web3 industry. Greater adoption could lead to incredible benefits for creators, owners and the NFT ecosystem as a whole.
This announcement follows a16z’s launch of the $600 million Games One Fund in May, which will invest in the games and metaverse industries.
