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$35 sculpture found at an Austin Goodwill was looted from a museum during WWII
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Re: $35 sculpture found at an Austin Goodwill was looted from a museum during WWII
#62One problem with NFTs is that it's harder for them to be stolen. And once lost, they can never be recovered.
Screenshot.
The art is not the NFT. The person only "owns" a hash code that points to the art.
Re: $35 sculpture found at an Austin Goodwill was looted from a museum during WWII
#63> She was in possession of a looted piece of ancient art. She couldn't keep it. I don't understand. Museums in the West are full of looted ancient art [1]. Why are they allowed to keep it, but this woman cannot keep this one item? [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/16/learning/should-museums-r...
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Not committing theft, or returning shit you stole, is considered "woke" now?
Re: $35 sculpture found at an Austin Goodwill was looted from a museum during WWII
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
Possession and sale of stolen goods is not legal, just not a crime unless you are aware it's stolen/likely stolen.
Genuinely curious, what if something is sold three times? Imagine a collector's edition book - Say it's stolen, then a month later it's listed on FB Marketplace, then the buyer re-lists it on ebay, then that ebay buyer sells it to a pawn shop. Does the person who was robbed still have a right to the book? Or are there special laws for the consideration of historical artifacts?
Yes, the law is that it belongs to the bona-fide owner. The third buyer needs to get their money back from the second, the second gets their money back from the first, the first goes to jail. The fact that this is often impossible is legally irrelevant, it belongs to the original owner.
One interesting place this came up was in the post-2008 financial crisis... turns out a lot of banks had been using an off-the-books legal record system, and transferred ownership of the property to the record system, and the record system would move it around internally to avoid filing fees every time a mortgage was resold. But this is actually specifically illegal in most jurisdictions, governments have a strong interest in a verifiable chain of custody maintained by themselves, they don't want it to go to an off-the-books system because then they might not be able to trace the true owner of a property. There is actually case-law dating back to the mid-1800s on specifically this - modern bankers aren't the first ones to try and create a "bearer note" conveying ownership of a mortgage lien, and it was specifically slapped down at that time, ruling that doing so would "separate" the note from the actual deed, invalidating the lien.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/06/business/06mers.html
https://repository.uchastings.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl...
And it also turns out that many of the banks did it digitally, so they could not actually provide the original wet-ink mortgage, so they did not have an effective lien on the property at all in any respect, nor could they rebuild it themselves unless the owner voluntarily re-signed a note. So many of the properties in that era have (big airquotes) """title insurance""" that includes a clause that basically says "in the event of a defect in title, the title insurance doesn't pay out". So if the original owner figured out they might be off the hook, they could come back with improper foreclosure and get the property back, and you would be left paying a mortgage on nothing because the title insurance didn't pay out. My parents were looking to buy a foreclosed property in that timespan and the bank tried to pull one of those and they walked away.
(also, in that era many banks responded by simply forging the wet-ink mortgage notes. When they got caught, oops, no penalty and they got to try it again. Laws are for plebians.)
https://www.propublica.org/article/disputes-over-citigroups-...
https://financialpost.com/news/economy/four-years-later-u-s-...
Re: $35 sculpture found at an Austin Goodwill was looted from a museum during WWII
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
But that’s not how the real world works. She 100% did the right thing here. And frankly she deserves a payout for all of the legwork.
She deserves a payout because she spent money a on lawyer to get a payout? That seems circular.
She specifically stated this in her article,
> She was in possession of a looted piece of ancient art. She couldn't keep it. She couldn't sell it. And giving it back to its rightful owners was a lot harder than it sounds.
Why are you building up a false narrative?
Re: $35 sculpture found at an Austin Goodwill was looted from a museum during WWII
#66What amazes me about all these stories is the ridiculously low prices the thrift store charged. Here in the Seattle area, everything seems to grossly overpriced in thrift stores.
Goodwill in particular moves items between markets and prices them based on the local economy. Gone are the days of 2010 when you could walk into the Bellevue Goodwill and find lightly used designer clothing that some retired Microsoft engineer was tired of. Now everything's priced higher than eBay and there's no reason to stop by. Everyone else wants to be a "Boutique" and charge high end prices for used goods. Blam…
I think more than that, the good stuff ends up on shopgoodwill.com, so it's increasingly difficult to find interesting or valuable things in the physical stores.
It makes some amount of sense; there's a bigger market online so they get higher prices and people looking for obscure things are more likely to find them than by visiting stores and hoping to get lucky. It's kind of a shame though that the stores are less fun to visit.
Re: $35 sculpture found at an Austin Goodwill was looted from a museum during WWII
#67> She was in possession of a looted piece of ancient art. She couldn't keep it. I don't understand. Museums in the West are full of looted ancient art [1]. Why are they allowed to keep it, but this woman cannot keep this one item? [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/16/learning/should-museums-r...
Well there’s even a looted diamond sitting in the crown of the British queen[0].
Re: $35 sculpture found at an Austin Goodwill was looted from a museum during WWII
#68> She was in possession of a looted piece of ancient art. She couldn't keep it. I don't understand. Museums in the West are full of looted ancient art [1]. Why are they allowed to keep it, but this woman cannot keep this one item? [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/16/learning/should-museums-r...
Museums shouldn't be full of looted treasures, museums should be full of treasures of the culture who built the museum. It is an injustice that any significant artifact is not in the custodianship of the culture it belongs to and when the infrastructure is in place to preserve the items, they should be returned to the community they came from.
Re: $35 sculpture found at an Austin Goodwill was looted from a museum during WWII
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Possession and sale of stolen goods is not legal, just not a crime unless you are aware it's stolen/likely stolen.
Genuinely curious, what if something is sold three times? Imagine a collector's edition book - Say it's stolen, then a month later it's listed on FB Marketplace, then the buyer re-lists it on ebay, then that ebay buyer sells it to a pawn shop. Does the person who was robbed still have a right to the book? Or are there special laws for the consideration of historical artifacts?
> Does the person who was robbed still have a right to the book?
Yes, and everyone who bought it under false pretenses are entitled to a refund, but what actually happens in reality is messy and pretty much down to how far law enforcement is willing to go. Someone is always left holding the bag, ideally it would be the original thief but it's most likely going to be the last person in the chain who can be identified or isn't willing to go to the effort.