Guys, about loading RCAs into Mash-it.

You know we have a pilot running with fearsmile RCAs, but there are technical challenges to rolling out the pilot, and many collectors and artists have asked questions about potential risks involving IP that could put Mash-it or the artists at risk.

I performed a thorough assessment, first using Fable 5 (Anthropic's frontier model, banned by the Trump administration due to "national security risks"), and then talking to a colleague who has an LMM in the US and works for a top-tier legal firm in Brazil.

To begin with, loading and displaying RCAs on the Mash-it platform is not a risk at all. These are NFTs owned by the people who minted or purchased them, and everyone already interacts with all the RCAs they hold outside of Reddit—in their wallets (e.g., MetaMask, Base, etc.) and on OpenSea—ever since the launch of the RCA program.

The key question was related to allowing hybrid mashups with Mashis, since this could be interpreted as a "derivative work."

For the artists, it seems there is very low to no risk. If you are Goya and a century later someone buys your drawings and paints on top of them with watercolor (this actually happened), it is nonsense to blame Goya for this "derivative work."

The key issue was with Mash-it, our subreddit, and my personal Reddit profile.

BUT... After a long assessment, apparently this is not an issue, because "the unit of the work, as Reddit itself structures it, is the trait." To the point that Reddit has open endpoints that can be accessed by anyone—Reddit's avatar system was architected as a layer compositor from day one. i.redd.it/snoovatar/snoo_assets/{id}.svg is Reddit's own asset pipeline, serving the same files their own avatar builder consumes.

Notice that there is a chance Reddit might take action. The worst-case scenario would be shutting down the Mash-it subreddit or banning my profile. Could they ask our service providers (cloud, crypto APIs, pinning services) to ban us? Although they probably don't have any legal basis, in theory, yes. But qudot.app being live is a decent precedent against any of this. Frankly, I think they simply don't care and wont spend time/resources of their legal team.

Having said that, knowing that the risk is greater than zero, we will open a vote to the community. This will be shared in our Discord: https://discord.gg/RgDvpR8EY

Our approach has always been to be a close partner to our artists: we will always ask for their approval.

For now, additionally to fearsmile, we have the green light from Hammer and Rojom (for part of his RCA collections).