Blockchain makes enforcement against third parties impossible

As with their predecessors, blockchain-based information architectures are likely to face significant architectural infringement challenges stemming from users’ infringements and the architecture’s novel aspect (in this case, immutability). With standard user-generated content on the Internet, a platform can easily remove infringing content once it learns of it, thus meeting its copyright law obligations for the DMCA safe harbor and contributory liability.308 But with blockchain, the infringing content or link to the infringing content would be written into the blockchain itself and become a permanent part of content that is distributed to other servers.309 Depending on how the content is structured, a platform may host infringing user-created content but be powerless to remove it due to blockchain’s immutability. While novel risks may exist for other actors too, including NFT owners and network service providers, architectural infringement claims strike at the operation of the information architecture itself, implicating the operating (or hosting) platform.