Live data from Hacker News

TheNFTBay: Fake, but Worth Discussing

clubnft.com

51–60 of 195 posts

Re: TheNFTBay: Fake, but Worth Discussing

#51
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For real estate lawyers, a full understanding of all the laws is important. For someone who might want to buy a house, a rough understanding is sufficient. That's why I provide both. Not everybody needs to know or care about the exact details in order to decide it is worth owning a house. But if they are interested, they can learn. I hope providing both sides of it is seen as useful in that light - it is not self-con…

> Just like a deed conveys ownership of a house at some address, the token conveys ownership of that media. This is just a lie. The token doesn’t convey ownership of then media. There is no rough understanding by which this is true. > I make it clear exactly what rights you and others have over the media, which is basically none. Which you acknowledge here. This isn’t a matter of exact details that aren’t important t…

> This is just a lie. The token doesn’t convey ownership of then media. There is no rough understanding by which this is true.

The debate around this is pretty somewhat tiresome. Yes, you have to buy into the believe that the token represents the media, but it's as good a definition as any because all ways we talk colloquially about "owning" a JPEG are simply not the same as owning a chair.

- Copyright is just a set of limited legal rights granted to someone temporarily by certain jurisdictions. It's not the same thing as owning something, which is why we were laughing at the "you wouldn't steal a car" ads in the 2000s.

- Actual ownership means having access to a copy of the bytes, which is not perceived as meaningful, and only valuable to the extend that access is otherwise arbitrarily restricted.

- You can choose to believe in the artificial scarcity of a certificate of ownership.

Re: TheNFTBay: Fake, but Worth Discussing

#52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not, because the star registry doesn't have provenance of the Milky Way.

And neither does the Blockchain have provenance of... anything really.

Of course it does. Go try and right click save a Bitcoin and sell it on Coinbase or Gemini.

Re: TheNFTBay: Fake, but Worth Discussing

#53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not, because the star registry doesn't have provenance of the Milky Way.

And neither does the Blockchain have provenance of... anything really.

The blockchains have provenance of themselves and the space within them, which is exactly what the NFT represents. Nothing more, nothing less.

Re: TheNFTBay: Fake, but Worth Discussing

#54
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean technically speaking IP laws mean that the image is protected and improper use of it can be challenged. It’s just the ownership on the blockchain doesn’t confer that usually.

> I mean technically speaking IP laws mean that the image is protected and improper use of it can be challenged Let's be real. AP, AFP, Reuters and Getty try to protect their images by charging for the full resolution pics . People will gladly use the 580x830 instead of the pricy 5800x8300. Brands which have been fighting this fight since the 90s such as Ray-Ban, LVMH, Gucci...they all fail to block counterfit physic…

Try playing music you don’t own a license to on YouTube or Twitch. IP enforcement on the Internet is having a Renaissance to the point of spuriously punishing people who aren’t violating anything.

Fraudulently minted NFTs have been taken down (at least from marketplaces) as well.

Re: TheNFTBay: Fake, but Worth Discussing

#55
post #2

> The value of an NFT is in having the right to insert yourself into that story, as the owner of that work, and with the ability to transfer that right to another person (i.e. selling the work). This is a false statement. The NFT doesn’t make you the owner of ‘the work’. It makes you the owner of the NFT. > The same way purchasing a painting gives you the right to resell that painting and prove to others that you are…

> If you own an NFT, you have no more rights over the media than someone who doesn’t own an NFT. False. Just like open source software, the devil is in the details (usually the LICENSE.md file). NFT projects vary dramatically in the rights they convey to holders. To the extent that these meatspace rights are enforceable, some convey commercial use, some convey personal use, some are published as creative commons, and…

From a recent conversation with a (soon to be) lawyer [as I understand it] software typically uses what's called a "shrink wrap contract" [1] wherein the _usage_ of the product implicitly accepts a license. As far as I can tell, nothing in the ERC721 standard (for example) has any provision for such a legal instrument to be included.

As such, I don't see how NFT "ownership" can (currently) be construed to possess any legal rights whatsoever unless agreed upon externally to the NFT in which case... what value is the NFT adding?

Would love to get a proper legal teardown of this space.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrink_wrap_contract

[2] All this said, I could see a world where an NFT smart contract requires a cryptographically signed _legal_ contract to be hashed into the transfer as a form of legal consent. But for some reason this isn't yet reality.

Re: TheNFTBay: Fake, but Worth Discussing

#56

It’s weird to keep using the Mona Lisa, when there’s a much more apropos metaphor intimately connected to crypto: NFTs are like naming rights. Crypto.com did not buy the Staples Center, and doesn’t have the right to charge admission. They bought (leased, really) the right to have their name associated with it. Some of that has the force of law, but a lot of it is social convention too. Here in Chicago, the Willis Gro…

It's a fools errand to try to equalize NFTs with anything from the physical reality we live in. NFTs are exclusive to blockchains and have no real-world counter-part, I think that is a part of why people are so confused about them. No analogy is perfect, and makes it hard for people to understand what they really are about. NFTs are not like naming rights, nor domain names, nor is it art, nor is it anything else.

Easiest explanation is that a NFT is like a new cryptocurrency, except it only exists one token of that cryptocurrency, and it's indivisible.

Re: TheNFTBay: Fake, but Worth Discussing

#57
post #27
post #2

> The value of an NFT is in having the right to insert yourself into that story, as the owner of that work, and with the ability to transfer that right to another person (i.e. selling the work). This is a false statement. The NFT doesn’t make you the owner of ‘the work’. It makes you the owner of the NFT. > The same way purchasing a painting gives you the right to resell that painting and prove to others that you are…

Let's just say that this wave of NFTs (in images, videos, audio) are going to die out in favour of the discovery of 'useful' NFTs. The future will probably begin to expand to more than just 'images, audio and video', which those specific NFTs in those categories are absolutely useless.

We've been hearing the same thing about cryptocurrency and blockchains for literally over a decade now. We always seem to be just a year or two away from real, useful applications of blockchains, or truely useful cryptocurrencies. Now we're we're apparently just a few years away from some nebulous "useful NFTs".

Re: TheNFTBay: Fake, but Worth Discussing

#58
post #2

> The value of an NFT is in having the right to insert yourself into that story, as the owner of that work, and with the ability to transfer that right to another person (i.e. selling the work). This is a false statement. The NFT doesn’t make you the owner of ‘the work’. It makes you the owner of the NFT. > The same way purchasing a painting gives you the right to resell that painting and prove to others that you are…

> If you own an NFT, you have no more rights over the media than someone who doesn’t own an NFT. False. Just like open source software, the devil is in the details (usually the LICENSE.md file). NFT projects vary dramatically in the rights they convey to holders. To the extent that these meatspace rights are enforceable, some convey commercial use, some convey personal use, some are published as creative commons, and…

NFT would be better explained if they used the older word: certificate.

But if we called NFT's 'certificates,' then less would buy into the Tulip mania.

NFT's are just a digest of certificates, public/private key pairs, and a chain of hashes.

If Lebron James put out a limited run digital model of himself, a set of hashes and schema describing the signatures, and released the certificates for purchase on Nike.com,then all the legal, authorized implementers, such as Fortnite, CS:Go, Roblox, and Halo:Infinite could all render the model, respect the ownership (or lack therof) by validating the account and object's cryptographic digest (comparing against a global ownership ledger), and allow free, unrestricted, cross-domain/platform/Intellectual property boundary transfership and use, aligning with meatspace laws...

...all without calling it an NFT.

Re: TheNFTBay: Fake, but Worth Discussing

#59
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just like a deed conveys ownership of a house at some address, the token conveys ownership of that media. This is just a lie. The token doesn’t convey ownership of then media. There is no rough understanding by which this is true. > I make it clear exactly what rights you and others have over the media, which is basically none. Which you acknowledge here. This isn’t a matter of exact details that aren’t important t…

> This is just a lie. The token doesn’t convey ownership of then media. There is no rough understanding by which this is true. The debate around this is pretty somewhat tiresome. Yes, you have to buy into the believe that the token represents the media, but it's as good a definition as any because all ways we talk colloquially about "owning" a JPEG are simply not the same as owning a chair. - Copyright is just a set…

> The debate around this is pretty somewhat tiresome. Yes, you have to buy into the believe that the token represents the media

This is fine. There is no problem with a club of people who choose to play a game in which they agree that a token has a particular meaning.

The rest of us can point out that it doesn’t mean the same thing outside that club of believers.

Post reply on HN