Biography
Alfred David Steiner has practiced law for more than two decades, first at large law firms, and now at his own firm, Meister & Steiner PLLC. Steiner focuses on intellectual property, technology, and new media matters, with a recent concentration on blockchain and NFT projects. Steiner has advised some of the world’s most prominent artists and NFT platforms on matters that require a thorough understanding of the law, the culture of the NFT and art industries, and the protocols and systems that govern NFTs. These representations have included counseling clients on high-profile NFT drops and groundbreaking NFT litigation. Steiner has written extensively on the legal implications of NFTs, including the papers Bored Apes & Monkey Selfies: Copyright & PFP NFTs and The Paper It’s Printed On: NFTs, Ownership and Conceptual Art. Steiner is slated to speak at both the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office and the Copyright Office roundtables on NFTs (January 24 and January 31, 2023, respectively).
Steiner is also an artist with a longstanding interest in the relationship between art, technology, and the law. Steiner’s work often poses novel aesthetic and legal questions, for example, what it would mean to mechanically reproduce an oil painting in three dimensions without copying its surface coloration. His works have been presented at institutions such as Artists Space and The Drawing Center, as well as in one-person exhibitions with commercial galleries in New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, Copenhagen and elsewhere, and have been discussed in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and The Guardian.
To better understand the NFT industry, Steiner has minted and sold hundreds of NFTs. In December, Steiner launched Your Story, a large-scale NFT project in which each NFT is deterministically generated by the minter’s blockchain address and entirely on-chain, including what may be the first rights grant contained in the NFT itself (i.e., in its tokenURI).
Steiner participates in several decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) focused on art and artists, including Fingerprints DAO, Friends With Benefits, and Bright Moments. Steiner operates a root node on the Q blockchain.