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“100 percent certain” his son has
not broken copyright law and
has asked lawyers to “audit” the
project.
WDBJ parent company Gray
Television owns the copyright to
the original footage of the shoot-
ing and has declined to hand it
over. Kevin Latek, chief legal
officer for Gray Television, con-
tends the footage does not depict
Alison Parker’s killing since the
“video does not show the assail-
ant or the shootings during the
horrific incident.”
In a statement, Latek said the
company has “repeatedly offered
to provide Mr. Parker with the
additional copyright license” to
call on social media companies
to remove the WDBJ footage “if it
is being used inappropriately.”
That includes the right to act
as their agent with the HONR
network, a nonprofit created by
Pozner that helps people target-
ed by online harassment and
hate. “By doing so, we enabledRarible, the marketplace
where the NFT was created,
temporarily blocked access to
Parker’s token on Tuesday after
this story was published. By
Wednesday, access was restored.
Rarible did not say why the
NFT was blocked. According to
its website, Rarible may block or
hide an NFT “when a digital
asset violates copyright laws,
regulations or community guide-
lines which Rarible abides by.”
The company will “immediately
remove” content that may violate
copyright, according to its web-
site.
Moish Peltz, an intellectual
property lawyer who specializes
in blockchain, crypto and NFTs,
said the digital tokens could pose
unique tests for how copyright
principles apply in cases with
extenuating circumstances.
“We’re not rewriting copyright
law here, but I do think that
NFTs create a new context where
there just aren’t legal decisions
as to how they should apply in
certain cases,” Peltz said, adding
that “some edge cases” raise
“some interesting questions.”
Parker is hoping his situation
will be one of those edge cases.
Amid the dispute, his relation-
ship with Gray Television has
deteriorated, and the company
has hired a communications
firm, Breakwater Strategy, to
deal with matters related to
Parker.
In a statement sent to The Post
by a Breakwater Strategy repre-
sentative, Latek accused Parker
of making false statements about
the company and of leaving
“threatening and harassing
voicemails for Gray Television
employees at all levels.”
Parker concedes that his NFT
strategy places him in “unchart-
ed waters.” But, he said, “in lieu
of co-copyright, this is the only
thing that we can do.”of videos depicting this tragedy
since 2015, and continue to pro-
actively remove more,” Ridings
said in a statement, adding that
Facebook encourages the contin-
ued reporting of such content.
But years later, videos upload-
ed in the days immediately after
the shooting remain online. A
review by The Washington Post
found nearly 20 posts on Face-
book containing a version of the
shooting footage, including some
filmed by the gunman.
While some had only a few
hundred views, others had tens
of thousands, including one with
over 115,000 views and over
1,000 likes that had remained up
since August 2015. Facebook re-
moved all of the videos after they
were flagged by The Post.
To this day, Parker hasn’t
watched any of the footage. “I
can’t,” he says.
Aderson Francois, a George-
town Law professor who repre-
sented Parker in his complaints
to the Federal Trade Commission
against Facebook and YouTube,
called it “indescribably awful” to
not only have to report the videos
one by one but also to read and
listen to “the conspiracy theories
that folks are spinning” around
the shooting, including that it
was faked or part of a campaign
to seize people’s guns.
“When you watch them, you
have to step away after a while,”
Francois said. “After a while, it
causes me to have nightmares, to
have sleepless nights, to have
flashbacks.”
Parker did not inform Gray
Television of his intent to make
an NFT of the footage before
minting it. Asked for comment
on Parker’s NFT, Latek said,
“While we have provided usage
licenses to third parties, those
usage licenses do not and never
have allowed them to turn our
content into NFTs.”the HONR Network to flag the
video for removal from platforms
like YouTube and Facebook,”
Latek said.
Parker and his legal advisers
say that without owning the
footage, the usage license is of
little use when it comes to forc-
ing social media companies to
remove clips of the killings. By
leaning on the license as his legal
basis to create an NFT of the
copyrighted WDBJ footage,
Parker hopes to bypass the
standoff with Gray Television
and take up his case again direct-
ly with the social media plat-
forms.
Even if Parker’s gambit works,
getting the copyrighted footage
taken down would only be half of
the answer. The NFT doesn’t
cover a separate clip of the
shooting taped by the shooter,
Vester Lee Flanagan, a former
WDBJ reporter who was fired in- Some platforms, like You-
Tube, have been more rigorous
about removing Flanagan’s foot-
age, in accordance with the plat-
form’s policy of banning videos
of violent events when filmed by
the perpetrator.
“We remain committed to re-
moving violent footage filmed by
Alison Parker’s murderer, and we
rigorously enforce our policies
using a combination of machine
learning technology and human
review,” YouTube spokesperson
Jack Malon said in a statement.
Under YouTube’s policies, the
platform may prohibit younger
users from viewing a violent
video instead of removing the
post if it includes “sufficient”
educational context, such as in a
news report, Malon said.
Facebook bans any videos that
depict the shooting from any
angle, with no exceptions, ac-
cording to Jen Ridings, a spokes-
person for parent company
Meta. “We’ve removed thousands
gets tens of thousands of views,
despite the efforts by Parker’s
father to eliminate the clips from
the Internet.
Now, Andy Parker has trans-
formed the clip of the killings
into a non-fungible token, or
NFT, in a complex and potential-
ly futile bid to claim ownership
over the videos, a tactic to use
copyright to force the hand of Big
Tech. “This is the Hail Mary,”
Parker said, an “act of despera-
tion.”
While Facebook and YouTube
say they have taken down thou-
sands of clips of the killings,
dozens have remained on the
platforms. Through the years,
Parker has deployed a range of
strategies for erasing the strag-
glers, enlisting a fleet of allies to
search and flag the videos and
filing complaints with federal
regulators. Last month, he
launched a congressional cam-
paign focused partly on holding
social media companies account-
able for the spread of harmful
content on their sites.
Under current law, the plat-
forms are largely shielded from
liability for the content of posts
by their users. But the platforms
may still be subject to copyright
claims if they don’t remove in-
fringing content, and experts say
a lawsuit alleging that the video
is copyrighted material could
offer Parker a more effective path
to getting it taken down.
“For victims of horrific images
being distributed on the Internet
generally, unfortunately and in-
appropriately copyright does
end up being an effective tool,”
said Adam Massey, a partner at
C.A. Goldberg, a New York law
firm that has advised Parker.
Families of shooting victims
have often relied on copyright
law to get results. Lenny Pozner,
whose son was killed in the
Sandy Hook Elementary School
shooting in 2012, has filed hun-
dreds of copyright claims to get
pictures of his son taken down
from websites spreading base-
less conspiracy theories about
the deadly shooting. Copyright,
Pozner has said, is a more effec-
tive tool than relying on the
platforms’ policies against hoax-
es, for instance, which can often
be opaque and unevenly en-
forced.
Copyright also has been a
useful tool for victims of noncon-
sensual pornography, where the
mere threat of legal action can be
more effective than petitioning
platforms, Massey said. “In the
early days, there were folks,
mostly women, who were having
to register their copyrights of
their nudes with the government
to try and get them taken off
websites,” he said. “Part of the
logic is that, if you have the
copyright, you can more effec-
tively advocate with the plat-
forms for their removal.”
Parker does not own the copy-
right to the footage of his daugh-
ter’s death that aired on CBS
affiliate WDBJ in 2015. But in
December he created an NFT of
the video on Rarible, a market-
place that deals in cryptocurren-
cy, in an attempt to claim copy-
right ownership of the clip. That,
he hopes, will give him legal
standing to sue the social media
companies to remove the videos
from circulation.
NFTs are unique pieces of
digital content logged as assets
using blockchain, the same tech-
nology that powers cryptocur-
rency. Over the past year, NFTs
have exploded in popularity as
people have rushed to buy, sell
and trade NFT collectibles creat-
ed from fine art, crude memes
and even an animated version of
a hat worn by Melania Trump.
Under existing laws, copyright
holders are exclusively able to
reproduce, adapt or display their
original work, unless they grant
PARKER FROM G1
A father wants to use an NFT to remove painful memories
2017 PHOTO BY JIM WATSON/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGESCOURTESY OF CHRIS HURSTBroadcast journalist Alison Parker and her boyfriend, Chris Hurst,
in 2015. She was killed by a former colleague later that year.
another party permission to do
so. Intellectual property lawyers
said the concepts should hold
true for NFTs.
But the rush to transform the
vast swath of content circulating
freely online into NFTs has un-
earthed ownership disputes. The
blockchain records a permanent
history of every transaction on a
decentralized server, theoretical-
ly making it easy to track the
ownership. Amid the buying
blitz are situations like Parker’s,
where an NFT holder has created
a duplicate certified version of a
piece of content, leaving two
purported owners of the same
media.
Experts say the case law on
NFT ownership is still in the
early stages of development and
has already prompted a number
of copyright disputes. In one
instance, a 12-year-old coder sold
an NFT collection he created of
pixelated whale images called
“Weird Whales” for over
$300,000. But according to For-
tune magazine, users accused
the project of copying a separate
image the coder does not appear
to own to create his NFT. The
boy’s father told BBC News he isBARBARA PARKERABOVE:
Barbara
Parker works
at home in
Virginia near
a shelf with
local Emmy
Awards her
daughter
Alison won.
LEFT: Andy
Parker is
fighting to
claim copy -
right over
video of the
shoot ing of
his daughter
in a complex
bid to force
the hand of
Big Tech
companies.