Charlie Bit My Finger video to be taken off YouTube after selling for £500k • Hacker News Board

Re: Charlie Bit My Finger video to be taken off YouTube after selling for £500k

#191

Post by oneeyedpigeon » Tue, May 25, 2021, 11:29 PM UTC

kbelder wrote: post #100

sumtechguy wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am more bewildered as I try to figure out where the value is coming from. An NFT as far as I can tell is just saying 'yes I own this thing'. But the original creator still owns everything really relevant about that thing anyway. What are they buying? Are there any relevant resources out there that lay out where the value is derived?

As near as I figure, it's not even 'yes I own this thing'. It's 'I own the NFT that refers to that thing', which only happens to connote ownership by convention. IE... somebody could sell the object and keep the NFT, or vice versa. There's no legal concept tying the NFT to ownership of the object, except perhaps indirectly via contract.

> I own the NFT that refers to that thing

Isn't it more like "I own an NFT that refers to that thing"? There's nothing to stop the actual owner from 'printing' as many NFTs as they want, right?

Re: Charlie Bit My Finger video to be taken off YouTube after selling for £500k

#192

Post by matheusmoreira » Tue, May 25, 2021, 11:29 PM UTC

bigdollopenergy wrote: post #118

ALittleLight wrote: post #17

I would describe myself, usually, as not a jealous man. I don't recollect the last time I've felt jealousy. But, something about NFTs provokes anger within me. Maybe that anger is jealously. It feels like NFTs are a mockery of the "market" for lack of a better word. When I think of what I would need to sell (items or time doing labor) to get these amounts and how incredibly useless NFTs actually are... It's frustrati…

I recently heard someone say "I'm not stupid enough to make money in this market", and I think it rings very true. With the short squeeze speculation on stocks, the crypto run+crash and NFT's. The market is a very confusing place nowadays. You'd have to be bonkers to invest in these things on paper, but yet, lot's of people are making bank from it every day (and vice versa). NFT is probably the most confusing of the…

> I'm not stupid enough to make money in this market

> What are all the stupid people going to pile in on next so i can get in and out before it crashes?

Haha that's awesome. I spent so many hours researching stuff to invest in so I could make a good decision or at least an educated one. Company stock, cryptocurrency projects, whitepapers... And then I watched people making ridiculous amounts of money off of DOGE of all things just because a billionaire tweeted funny dogecoin memes. Then people pumped the huge wave of animal shitcoin scams that came after to ridiculous prices as well. Now I'm watching people spend millions on non-fungible tokens that do nothing.

It's the kind of mind screw that makes you lose all sense of right and wrong. The world just stops making sense.

Re: Charlie Bit My Finger video to be taken off YouTube after selling for £500k

#193

Post by tareqak » Tue, May 25, 2021, 11:30 PM UTC

ALittleLight wrote: post #17

I would describe myself, usually, as not a jealous man. I don't recollect the last time I've felt jealousy. But, something about NFTs provokes anger within me. Maybe that anger is jealously. It feels like NFTs are a mockery of the "market" for lack of a better word. When I think of what I would need to sell (items or time doing labor) to get these amounts and how incredibly useless NFTs actually are... It's frustrati…

> I don't feel this way about inherited wealth, or people who got money through the lottery, or for being famous reality show people, but something about NFTs really rubs me the wrong way.

This paragraph interests me deeply. It is clearly a personal feeling and one that I have empathy for. However, a few things came to my mind when I read it.

1) You and I were born into a world where inheritance, lotteries, and celebrities existed, but NFTs were invented in our lifetime. Is it the newness/novelty of NFTs at issue?

2) Suppose the answer to 1) is no i.e. I am not troubled by the newness of NFTs. Alright, instead let’s imagine the first incidence of inheritance, or lotteries, or celebrity status that yielded material/monetary reward. Did people feel similarly about these ways of acquiring money back when these ways were novel?

3) What about applying the general idea of finding/inventing/innovating to create new industries e.g. advertising technology? Some people have similar feelings about the nominal value being created versus the perceived value of a whole host of activities: venture capital, e-sports, advertising, sex work, content creation, financial services/instruments, the creative arts and their subfields, etc. You can search for posts and comments on this forum expressing exactly that on each of the examples I listed.

4) What do we call it? I would say the word jealousy captures one side of the dimension where perceived value doesn’t match up with actual value that was exchanged (perceived value is less than the value exchanged).

5) Why do we do it? Why do we judge the perceived fairness of transactions that we are not party to?

6) Now, back to the initial question: what makes some forms of wealth transfer fair and others not?

Re: Charlie Bit My Finger video to be taken off YouTube after selling for £500k

#194

Post by jallen_dot_dev » Tue, May 25, 2021, 11:30 PM UTC

DennisP wrote: post #159

kbelder wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As near as I figure, it's not even 'yes I own this thing'. It's 'I own the NFT that refers to that thing', which only happens to connote ownership by convention. IE... somebody could sell the object and keep the NFT, or vice versa. There's no legal concept tying the NFT to ownership of the object, except perhaps indirectly via contract.

William Shatner is working with a startup that actually has a legal framework around NFTs, where the NFT denotes ownership of a collectible in a vault. You can trade the NFT around but the current owner can redeem it and take delivery of the physical item. It's similar to what's been done in the high-end art world for years. People who buy a $50M painting don't usually hang it on their walls, they just leave it in a…

>You can trade the NFT around but the current owner can redeem it and take delivery of the physical item.

What happens if someone buys my NFT but I refuse to deliver the physical item? It seems we need to pull in the legacy legal system to enforce the transfer, at which point I wonder what value the blockchain added in the first place.

Re: Charlie Bit My Finger video to be taken off YouTube after selling for £500k

#195

Post by tom_mellior » Tue, May 25, 2021, 11:34 PM UTC

jayd16 wrote: post #96

hoppyhoppy2 wrote: post #23

My main basic questions remain after reading about these NFT sales. Why can't someone just buy all rights to this video the same way a company can buy the rights to a film? What does the blockchain do that a couple lawyers and some paperwork couldn't? Why a blockchain-based digital "certificate" instead of just a certificate? Does my birth certificate or marriage certificate or college diploma need an upgrade to an N…

Its better to think of NFTs as limited edition merch instead of ownership of the work.

Ha! This is an excellent take. Maybe minus the "limited edition" part, since whoever minted the NFT can just mint the same one again. Even if they claimed they wouldn't.

Re: Charlie Bit My Finger video to be taken off YouTube after selling for £500k

#196

Post by jazzyjackson » Tue, May 25, 2021, 11:39 PM UTC

echelon wrote: post #166

bigdollopenergy wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently heard someone say "I'm not stupid enough to make money in this market", and I think it rings very true. With the short squeeze speculation on stocks, the crypto run+crash and NFT's. The market is a very confusing place nowadays. You'd have to be bonkers to invest in these things on paper, but yet, lot's of people are making bank from it every day (and vice versa). NFT is probably the most confusing of the…

It gets even crazier. https://nft.gamestop.com GME as an NFT?

Actually its one of the few use cases that makes sense

Gamestop's whole business was used games. I mean they'd sell you a new copy happily, and you could sell it back at discount and spend the money on a different used game

Playstation / Xbox digital stores killed the market, now I pay $60 for the new assassin's creed and can never sell it, there's no such thing as a used game anymore

If Gamestop has streaming rights for certain games, then NFTs can represent who ones a copy of a game. If you're bored of a game, sell the license to play to someone else. (This is not even mentioning in-game items that could be traded on secondary markets)

Of course GameStop could conceivably build a tech stack that lets them manage 'who owns what license to what game' and a whole marketplace around that, but why build it yourself when people are already out there sending NFTs from one wallet to another.

Re: Charlie Bit My Finger video to be taken off YouTube after selling for £500k

#197

Post by matheusmoreira » Tue, May 25, 2021, 11:43 PM UTC

tareqak wrote: post #193

ALittleLight wrote: post #17

I would describe myself, usually, as not a jealous man. I don't recollect the last time I've felt jealousy. But, something about NFTs provokes anger within me. Maybe that anger is jealously. It feels like NFTs are a mockery of the "market" for lack of a better word. When I think of what I would need to sell (items or time doing labor) to get these amounts and how incredibly useless NFTs actually are... It's frustrati…

> I don't feel this way about inherited wealth, or people who got money through the lottery, or for being famous reality show people, but something about NFTs really rubs me the wrong way. This paragraph interests me deeply. It is clearly a personal feeling and one that I have empathy for. However, a few things came to my mind when I read it. 1) You and I were born into a world where inheritance, lotteries, and celeb…

> Why do we do it? Why do we judge the perceived fairness of transactions that we are not party to?

How could we not? Someone dropping millions of dollars on a useless token really puts into perspective the value of my actual work and contributions to society. If literally nothing is worth millions, I must be worth less than nothing because I'm certainly not getting paid millions.

Re: Charlie Bit My Finger video to be taken off YouTube after selling for £500k

#198

Post by oneeyedpigeon » Tue, May 25, 2021, 11:46 PM UTC

jrochkind1 wrote: post #189

AlexandrB wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NFTs generally aren't a transfer of copyright. > An NFT is a bit like a collectible certificate of authenticity, but its owner does not actually buy the copyright itself - meaning the artwork the NFT represents can still be shown wherever the original artist or creator chooses. So the whole question is moot. All you own is the NFT and the NFT is associated with some cultural artifact but doesn't represent any legal r…

The question seems to be subject to a lot of confusion. A lot of other people in this thread seem to believe differently. The article in the OP also seems to believe differently, which is what made me ask the question. > But now the much-loved clip of baby Charlie gnawing on his brother Harry's finger will be taken off YouTube after it was sold for $760,999 (£538,000). > The Davies-Carr family auctioned the clip as a…

The owners can choose to remove the video from YouTube if they want. If the buyers are at least half-savvy, the sellers might opt to do that in order to give the NFT more 'worth'. But there's nothing inherent in NFT that means that's necessary, or that they couldn't just put it back on YouTube next week. Or that they couldn't sell hundreds of other NFTs for the same video, or sell the copyright to the video, the one thing in all this that's really meaningful.

Re: Charlie Bit My Finger video to be taken off YouTube after selling for £500k

#199

Post by oneeyedpigeon » Tue, May 25, 2021, 11:49 PM UTC

banana_giraffe wrote: post #32

jrochkind1 wrote: post #12

When someone bought this NFT (or in general), did someone sign a contract with you saying they transferred ownership in the intellectual property the NFT "represented"? (Ie, was at the other end of the URL, I guess?) Cause the NFT itself means nothing to courts or laws, does it? If someone owns the copyright in that video, they can send YouTube takedown notices. But what, if anything, makes NFT proof of ownership of…

> Cause the NFT itself means nothing to courts or laws, does it? We won't know till it's tried in court, but given that handshake agreements can carry weight in court if they can be proven, I'd suspect an NFT could be binding.

Aren't the people who are selling NFTs attaching terms and conditions to the effect of "this doesn't give you actual ownership"? In fact, the article states:

> its owner does not actually buy the copyright itself

Re: Charlie Bit My Finger video to be taken off YouTube after selling for £500k

#200

Post by oneeyedpigeon » Tue, May 25, 2021, 11:52 PM UTC

mattdesl wrote: post #176

legitster wrote: post #69

So, most NFTs are on the Ethereum network, correct? What's stopping people from just... making a new crypto NFT network? What if Doge NFTs take off - could everything be sold a second time?

There are already many NFT marketplaces across a range of blockchains. Depending on who you ask, it may be considered poor form to mint the same token on multiple chains. It would be like a print artist selling multiple editions of what they claim to be a limited 1/1 print run (nothing is stopping print artists from doing this now besides integrity & social contracts - it could devalue their work).

> It would be like a print artist selling multiple editions of what they claim to be a limited 1/1 print run

That sounds like it would be illegal.