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

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

#41

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…

Key point: buying the NFT does not transfer rights to you. You're just buying the NFT. The original creator retains the rights to the video.

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

#42

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.

Is there a handshake agreement that copyright was transferred? Do the NFT auction sites say anything about this?

What if the seller says "Oh, you thought I was selling you the copyright in the thing the NFT represents? I don't know how you got that idea, I never said that! I just sold you the NFT, that's it." Do people buying NFT's actually get some kind of agreement that the seller owned the copyright in the thing represneted and sold it with the NFT purchase?

Real questions, I don't use these things!

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

#43
post #22
post #18

What is preventing people from uploading the video back to YouTube? after all there are tons of shows already on there that are owned by media companies. I am sure this Charlie video has a lot of copies floating around.

There's nothing preventing it. It wouldn't be the original however, and in this scenario that's all that matters.

I'm not going to pretend I have an intimate knowledge of how NFT's work (I need to basically re-research the idea everytime it comes up), but I never understood the financial incentive to buy one, especially for these very old viral videos. I doubt any amount of merch made would make back hundreds of thousands, and I imagine most/all of the B2B potential is gone since these kinds of videos have long since left their 15 minutes of fame.

And As seen here, even the "rich trolling" potential is practically impossible to enforce since we run into the idea of "piracy" (in the loosest form of quotes you can imagine). A problem even billion dollar media empires can't fully enforce. Is there something here I'm missing?

----

on a side note: while memes like nyan cat make sense, I find it very ethically dubious to "own" what's essentially a personal memory of a real family. But I guess if it's the family themselves that sold it, the consentual factors are already in place.

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

#44

Is there any book about this phenomenon, that people spend fortune on memes?

But then the hustle would stop working. My take on the hustle is you post some garbage art as an NFT and have a rich buddy buy it for $100,000(?). Then your other garbage arts instantaneously become worth thousands because the media will pick up this story in proportion to the price*garbage factor. You then start dumping said garbage, eventually return the initial payment to your rich buddy and split the take.

Unfortunately we are likely past peak stupid in the crypto-world but you'll have another chance ~3 years from now since that's the crypto dumb-money time-constant. But if you still think there's time, visit https://mintable.app/ follow the advice above and report back.

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

#45
post #36

> Sunday's spending spree means the mysterious anonymous bidder will become the owner of the Charlie Bit My Finger clip. > 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. Genuinely curious. What does it mean to own a widely shared digital content, if you don't have the copyright to it? What's stopping the…

> What does it mean to own a widely shared digital content, if you don't have the copyright to it?

Nothing.

> What's stopping the copyright-owner from continuing to license the copyright to others, or even enforcing their copyright against you in future?

Nothing.

> From a legal perspective, how would the NFT owner even enforce their ownership against anyone else?

They can't.

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

#46
post #6

This is potentially the beginning of a very interesting trend, and something I have spent some time thinking about. My sense is that owning an NFT should allow you to control access to that content (even if your choice is just to make it publicly accessible). NFT doesn't have an ACL layer built in, so this would need to be added (has anyone already done this?) One open question is whether it actually makes sense to h…

> owning an NFT should allow you to control access to that content

are you aware that anyone may sell NFT for anything?

I could produce and sell NFT pointing to say Walmart website.

Or HN. Or Wikipedia.

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

#47

NFTs may be a way for open source developers to make some money off of their work. Linus Torvalds could make a few hundred millions by selling an NFT for Linux, considering a JPG file sold for $69 million [1]. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/11/arts/design/nft-auction-c...

Sure, Linus can sell an NFT containing the word "Linux" the same way he can sell a picture of his feet or just about anything else. It is all meaningless since (1) the NFT does not grant any ownership rights or licenses and (2) Linux code is anyways available under GPLv2.

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

#48
post #36

> Sunday's spending spree means the mysterious anonymous bidder will become the owner of the Charlie Bit My Finger clip. > 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. Genuinely curious. What does it mean to own a widely shared digital content, if you don't have the copyright to it? What's stopping the…

> What does it mean to own a widely shared digital content, if you don't have the copyright to it?

Therein lies the question. It's basically selling a digital derivative of something that gives you no rights besides owning that derivative itself.

Is there anything saying that the copyright owner can't sell another NFT to a competing NFT blockchain? What if people start using different NFTs for the same digital good?

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

#49

I've never seen this video before, and I've been on the Internet since the mid-90s. It doesn't make sense to take down the video though, because it's the views that make it more valuable.

>> I've never seen this video before, and I've been on the Internet since the mid-90s.

I dunno, so have I; and just - it was big, but there were so many of these kinda nonsense YouTube videos at the time this was trending it was kind of hard to catch them all.

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

#50

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…

This was kind of my question too. I am still yet to properly understand what the point in owning an NFT tied to a piece of digital art is.

Traditionally owning art is meaningful because you get to display it in your home/office etc. The artwork is intrinsically valuable as a unique material object. Digital art, on the other hand, can be duplicated easily so there is nothing you can point to and say "this is the original".

I don't see how that is synonymous with owning traditional art, you don't have anything unique since everyone can "own" Charlie bit my finger as much as the NFT owner owns it. We can watch the video whenever we want, even if it's taken down off of the official YT channel, there are thousands of copies everywhere. So unless you own the rights to the video and royalties or whatever then all you have is an NFT token that symbolizes something important to whoever thinks it's important (much like currency).

Seems to me that an NFT itself is more like a vanity plate on a car than anything else, basically bragging rights that you can sell on if anyone else sees value in bragging. I suppose the gamble is that NFTs will continue to mean something to someone but it does seem to me to be a long bet that people with piles of cash are hedging or simply don't mind paying $$$s for a fashion statement.

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