While NFTs representing collectibles usually make all the headlines, a recent court decision in the UK shows that your legal future may include NFTs calling you to court. Sound good? Let's go.

NFTs: they ain't what many think they are

In a prior post, I offered a non-authoritative and non-expansive description of the wide world of NFTs. In that post, available here, I tried to debunk some common misunderstandings about NFTs, including their expected uniqueness, visibility, ease of transfer, and value. I have also written elsewhere on the challenges of finding your own NFTs, displaying the NFTs or otherwise finding any associated information, and other gaps between the ideal state they describe and the reality of NFTs today.

Let's get to that court decision. It has to do with the process of being served with court papers to initiate court proceedings. 

Perhaps you have watched a tv show when someone has been charged with delivering court papers to a litigant in a law suit. That person faces a belligerent person who does not want to receive those papers and avoids the server or refuses the paper. Here is an example from television.

While it is generally understood that there is no real value to refuse to receive the paperwork, the process is still considered unpleasant and something to avoid. The tv scenes do make it seem like the process is only complete if the transfer is given person to person. In fact, the UK courts have already permitted electronic notification using Instagram, Facebook and other means. But in the case of D’Aloia v. Binance Holdings Limited & Others, the courts have permitted the "delivery" of the court documents using an NFT an airdropping it to the wallet of the litigant.

Read more at this link: https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2022/07/13/uk-court-allows-serving-of-suits-via-nfts/

This is good in some ways - the courts come into the tech age, there's a new means of reaching people who are difficult to get to or start proceedings when the litigants can't be found, NFTs are highlighted as having business uses other than Bored Apes.

This is bad in so many ways - few of us are monitoring the addresses our wallets manage for airdrops; it is risky to drill down into the information in an NFT due to NFT phishing; this just seems to set a really bad precedent.

What do you think?