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€2.6M spent for a book at auction, believed they would own the IP

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Re: €2.6M spent for a book at auction, believed they would own the IP

#251

Post by tzs »

donkeyd wrote: post #198
kybernetikos wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's access to broadcast media. When access to broadcast media was heavily gatekept, the official reality bubbles were few and strengthened everywhere. Now everyone has it, there can be far more bubbles. I also hope that we're in a transitional time as people get used to the new technology. I'm sure that it took people a while to understand how much they should believe newspapers or not when they first came a…

> Now everyone has it, there can be far more bubbles. Yeah, I feel like this is the issue. I've heard the theory that in the past, every village had a village idiot. The internet has enabled all these village idiots to find each other and to broadcast their idiocies. They feel strengthened in finding like-minded people and feel vindicated in their beliefs. Due to the size of the group and how vocal they are, they're…

I've heard the effect of internet compared to the effect of the printing press.

For the people on the other side of the curve from the village idiot that was true. Before the internet we (on HN I think most of us are on that side of the curve justifying the use of "we" here) had libraries and we had elaborate systems for indexing and searching [1] and providing notification of new information in our areas of interest.

We could do then most of what we now do on the internet as far as getting and processing information is concerned, just slower and we usually had to be fully clothed while doing it.

Like the printing press, what the internet did for us was make it so we could get that information faster, cheaper, and we could do it from home in whatever state of undress suited us.

For people on the village idiot side of the curve, the invention of the internet was not like invention of the printing press.

It was like the discovery of fire.

[1] A good example is a law library. Besides the books that contained the chronological record of cases and decisions from a given court, we had books that organized those cases by topic, books that provided summaries of the key legal points of each case, organized by topic, books that provided cross references for each case showing what later cases cited it, which points of the case they cited it for, and whether those citations were agreeing with it or overruling it.

Re: €2.6M spent for a book at auction, believed they would own the IP

#252

Post by notRobot »

thegregjones wrote: post #67

Everyone's favourite Gary Brannon appearing on HN is a pleasant surprise :-) if you're not already familiar with "Citation Needed" or "Two of these people are lying" take a look at their YouTube series

Submitter here. I'm a huge techdiff fan, which is why I follow Gary on Twitter, which is why I saw this story in the first place :)

Re: €2.6M spent for a book at auction, believed they would own the IP

#253

Post by SuoDuanDao »

the__alchemist wrote: post #240
jl6 wrote: post #158

For most of human history, people have lived in small, local information bubbles which were hard to penetrate with facts from the outside world. We see this manifest as the pre-industrial global patchwork of weird and wonderful religious/spiritual/cultural variety. Then somehow the world started to join up and information began to seep into local cultures and sweep away a lot of these pre-rational beliefs. And for a…

Neal Stephenson explored this in this book Fall; or, Dodge in Hell (And to a lesser extent, Termination Shock). In this depiction, parts of the world; especially red state USA, has succumbed to a post-truth society, made possible through the internet. The narrator implies that we had a limited window in human history where people took a fact-based approach to knowledge, starting with the scientific revolution, and en…

This makes me think of Wilbur's writings on the pre-trans fallacy, the idea that 'post truth' and 'pre-truth' are identical. A lot of the 'facts based' approach did require trusted authorities, and there wasn't much thought paid as to who was a trusted authority. Now that some serious abuses of authority have happened we're suddenly aware of just how screwed we can be if we trust the wrong authorities, but the answer isn't to do away with all trust in authorities. The people most able to navigate complexity seem to update both their mental models of the world and their trust in given authorities gradually, neither over-nor-undercorrecting when new information is added to the whole. At least that's my belief after reading 'superforecasters', something I recommend to anyone wrestling with the implications of the post-truth era.

Re: €2.6M spent for a book at auction, believed they would own the IP

#254

Post by mpeg »

pjc50 wrote: post #64
Genmutant wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happens if you upload copyright protected data in cleartext on a blockchain without having the distribution rights?

You can't really put content on the blockchain, that costs a surprising amount because of all the proof-of-waste. What happens is people put the content on a host and the URL on the blockchain. I suppose in theory it could be kept in IPFS, but few NFTs seem to bother with that.

The idea that people put the URL in the blockchain is misleading and people keep repeating it as a mantra.

Yes, you put a URL on the blockchain but it's almost always a URL to the ipfs protocol e.g. ipfs://QmVc6zuAneKJzicnJpfrqCH9gSy6bz54JhcypfJYhGUFQu

This identifier is a base58 encoding of a sha256 hash that points to the content. It doesn't actually tell you what host to use to find the content, that's completely left to the client app; so you could use an ipfs gateway like cloudflare-ipfs.com or ipfs.io or you could, imagining a future in which ipfs is not used anymore, use any other kind of p2p network to find the content.

Just like gnutella, or torrents, as long as someone out there is hosting the content it's usually possible to find it.

Re: €2.6M spent for a book at auction, believed they would own the IP

#255

Post by kgwgk »

boole1854 wrote: post #239
kgwgk wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the winners of the book auction do understand that they do not own the intellectual property Then maybe when they wrote We won the auction for €2.66M. Now our mission is to: 1. Make the book public (to the extent permitted by law) 2. Produce an original animated limited series inspired by the book and sell it to a streaming service they could have been more explicit about how #2 is as unlikely as it was before they…

On their official Medium account they are explicit about the fact that winning the auction has no direct legal effects on their ability to produce the animated series. [1]. Their goal is to leverage the publicity from the auction to open doors for discussions with the current IP holders in order to make progress on the animated series. [1] https://medium.com/@spicedao/roadmap-timeline-ae319c92505d

> ~$6.2MM (USD) to produce an animated film or TV series inspired by the contents of the manuscript

The budget seems low - more so if it has to pay for the rights (to multiple third parties!).

Re: €2.6M spent for a book at auction, believed they would own the IP

#256

Post by mpeg »

tluyben2 wrote: post #169
captn3m0 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m tempted to upload a magnet URL dump to a cheap blockchain (there has to be one, right?)

Sure, just take a newly launched one. People are launching bollocks coins every day.

There's multi-billion-dollar blockchains where transactions and storage cost a tiny fraction of what they do on Ethereum.

Re: €2.6M spent for a book at auction, believed they would own the IP

#257

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

brazzy wrote: post #91
cdirkx wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because the book remains on-chain, the book does not die, but crosses the boundary of physical to digital. It reminds me of the video game SOMA, where people upload a brain-scan of themselves to live on after some catastrophe, essentially making a digital copy of their consciousness. But because they are also still physically alive, they see the digital version of themselves as a clone, someone else. To "complete t…

It goes back at least 50 years more, to Star Trek transporters. And the most chilling version I've seen is in Charles Stross' Glasshouse , where some soldiers fight a virus that infects the consciousness of everyone using such a transporter. They "rescue" an infected population by chopping off their heads and throwing them into a transporter hacked to remove the virus. IIRC only the heads because transporting the ent…

For me the archetypal story of the genre is Think Like a Dinosaur:

The story postulates a transportation device (supervised by a dinosaur-like race of aliens) which can transmit an exact copy of a person's body to distant planets. The original body is disintegrated once reception at the destination is confirmed. In the story a woman is teleported to an alien planet, but the original is not disintegrated because reception cannot be confirmed at the time. Reception is later confirmed, and the original, not surprisingly, declines to "balance the equation" by re-entering the scanning and disintegrating device. This creates an ethical quandary which is viewed quite differently by the cold-blooded aliens who provided the teleportation technology, and their warm-blooded human associates.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_Like_a_Dinosaur

Transmission protocol errors, eh.

Re: €2.6M spent for a book at auction, believed they would own the IP

#258

Post by shrikant »

Sephiroth87 wrote: post #60
stnikolauswagne wrote: post #22

I made the mistake of diving a bit deeper into the group who bought it and found a proposal where they are talking about literally burning the book they just bought after digitizing it for … reasons I guess [0] At this point I just hope its some sort of practical joke or whatever because this just seems a bit much. [0] https://forum.spicedao.xyz/t/nft-of-the-book-w-proof-of-jpeg...

Let’s suspend disbelief for a moment and pretend everything worked as they say, in what world is giving access to the book to the few people that pay for the nft, “democratising”?

The dude in the linked forum post goes on to say this:

> Here is where we make the dreams of the Harkonnen become true. [...]

I'm finding it really very difficult to imagine that someone's read/watched Dune and come away thinking the the Harkonnen are the good guys. So I can't imagine that intellectual honesty is one of their strong points.

Re: €2.6M spent for a book at auction, believed they would own the IP

#259

Post by karpierz »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #129
pjc50 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Decentralized" means "out of the reach of law enforcement". Or at least that's what these people treat it as.

Hey that's pretty unfair, I was just chastised a couple days ago for implying the killer use case for the blockchain was criminality!

It's not criminality, it's _regulatory arbitrage_.

Re: €2.6M spent for a book at auction, believed they would own the IP

#260

Post by cuteboy19 »

ethanbond wrote: post #219
sneak wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NFT data is public, generally.

Then in what sense is owning a token owning anything?

> The little prince was still not satisfied. "If I own a scarf, I can tie it around my neck and take it away. If I own a flower, I can pick it and take it away. But you can't pick the stars!" "No, but I can put them in the bank." "What does that mean?" "That means that I write the number of my stars on a slip of paper. And then I lock that slip of paper in a drawer." "And that's all?" "That's enough!"

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry satirized NFTs 70 years before they were invented!

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