On February 8, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) sent a lawyer’s letter to the lawyers of the music NFT platform HitPiece, asking the platform to stop selling NFTs.
The RIAA asked HitPiece to stop infringing on the musicians’ intellectual property rights and take responsibility for selling NFT music without the original artist’s consent. RIAA chief legal officer Ken Doroshow wrote in the letter that HitPiece appears to be nothing more than a hoax designed to exploit fans’ love of music and desire to connect more closely with artists, using buzzwords and jargon to disguise their complete failure to obtain necessary rights. Fans are led to believe that they are buying NFTs that are genuinely related to the artist and their work, which is not the case. While the operator currently appears to have taken the main HitPiece site offline, this move is necessary to ensure a fair accounting of the damage HitPiece and its operators have done, and to ensure that the site or imitators are not simply taking another Names continue their scam.