NFTs are a bit silly, but so are most expensive collectibles. What makes a Mickey Mantle rookie card worth 5 million? I could get a good scan of it, and print my own. It’s the scarcity of legitimate copies that makes it valuable, just like an NFT.
Once again, I think that the Mickey Mantle rookie card for 5 million is silly, but there are those willing to pay it. And ultimately, that’s what makes anything valuable, that someone is willing to pay for it.
You also don’t go broke if your hard drive fails.
A bank is useful, because no matter what circumstances you find yourself in, eventually, you should be able to convince the people at the bank that the account belongs to you, and regain access to the funds. There is no such protection with bitcoin. Lose access to your bitcoin wallet, and there is no recourse available.
This is where the primary difference with NFTs lies.
With a baseball cards, there has also been a speculative bubble recently but there’s an underlying “something” there - there are fans who would love to have the cards themselves. Yes, there are those speculatively investing in them to try to make money quick but even if the market collapsed and the cards hardly worth the stock they’re printed on, there’s a large community of collectors who would still value the cards for themselves. At a minimum, a ton of kids would. And while collectors want to preserve them in the best condition, a lot of them would still love getting a bunch of random cards stored in a moldy basement whether or not they’re worth anything.
As far as I know with NFTs, even excepting that most of them are just links to a server where images can be accessed, very few people actually value the images themselves. If the market collapsed, there’s not going to be a bunch of collectors trading NFT images and hanging out in stores admiring them. Or being thrilled with randomly finding an image of a monkey and setting it on the mantle. It’s almost pure speculative investment based on artificial scarcity ‘enforced’ by the blockchain.
This is where the “speculation” vs “investment” thing above in the thread confused me. Yes, it’s an investment but it is a speculative one. It’s not or the other - it’s both. One doesn’t invest in Coca-cola hoping/expecting it’ll shoot up 1000% this year. But one does do that with crypto. Not because there’s a lot of faith that it’s a good long term store of wealth like a blue chip stock but as a virtual get rich quick scheme.
My understanding of an NFT is that it also give you rights over the work in question. So, if I get an NFT of an image of a monkey, then I can print it off and put it on my mantle, and it would be a copyright infringement if you did.
Now, I’ll agree that at this time, it’s certainly more speculation than investment, but that doesn’t mean that the technology itself is always going to be. Let’s say I’m a famous artist of some sort, and I release my next work of art as an NFT. Only one person is allowed to own and display this work, wouldn’t that have intrinsic value?
“Value” is in the eye of the beholder. If nobody else even ‘wants’ the work, then not really.
That seems to be the problem at the moment. Let’s say a famous artists did release art as an NFT and this conferred some kind of exclusivity. How is this different from the artists doing the same thing with a canvas? Or doing an image online and signing a binding legal agreement transferring ownership of that work to the highest bigger without going the NFT route? What does the NFT really buy in this case? An art forger can still forge it illegally. It devolves to a fancy way of doing what we can already do but with the magic of technology!
Personally, I am a terrible artist when it comes to canvass or pen, but I’m actually really good when it comes to graphic arts, having produced all the marketing materials for my business. I do a little composing as well, music that has never passed through an actual instrument or been transcribed on a paper score. The existence of digital items is growing, and they are just as real and valuable as things that are transfixed to “real” materials.
It avoids needing complicated paperwork and lawyers.
And there are art forgers who will make you a painting that is just as good as the real one. It won’t be as valuable though, because the value doesn’t come from the image or the medium it is fixed in, it comes from the exclusive ownership of the real painting.
I could also forge a bill of sale and contract. Maybe this isn’t good enough to actually sell it, but it could be enough to impress my friends with my “expensive” art collection. And maybe you like this work of art, so are willing to pay me for it. How will you determine if the documentation that comes along with it is valid? You’d have to do a decent amount of legwork to track the history and provenance to ensure that I am the legitimate owner and have the right to sell it. Worth it for something in the millions of dollars, but what about a couple few hundred?
I’d say that the best thing that NFT has going for it is that it is easier and more reliable to tell the actual ownership of a piece of art. I can see that image of a monkey on your mantle, lift my smart phone up to take a snap of it, and get back that you are the actual legal owner of it. If I buy it from you, then that ownership is instantly updated, so now all my friends who see a monkey on my wall will know that I paid good money for the right to display it.
In the end, I think that BitCoin and other block chain style currencies are a scam at best, an instrument of the downfall of civilization at worst.
But NFT may have some use in providing easier proof of ownership and transfer of title for items that are physically fungible.
Nothing except supply and demand, but that’s the point; people touting NFTs as some amazing store of value nobody’s thought of before have apparently never heard of stamps or baseball cards. It’s just another collectible. They MAY be like Mickey Mantle cards and retain value. They might also be like Beanie Babies.
An unenforceable contract is of no legal meaning. Copyright enforcement customarily comes into force when a person does something with a work that could cause harm to the owner of the copyright. If, for instance, you burn some songs from your phone onto a CD to play in your car, that is legal in some places, and ever where not it’s effectively unenforceable and no one cares. If you start distributing those songs on the internet, that’s a different story. They went after Napster guns a-blazin’, and justifiably so.
If I print off the monkey picture Jimmy Fallon paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for and put it on my wall, that isn’t even necessarily copyright infringement at all - indeed, these pictures are VERY commonly used on the Internet by mainstream news sources, and it’s allowable as a fair use, and that’s way more of an obvious commercial use than me printing it out at home. Any court would laugh Fallon out of the courthouse if he tried suing me for printing his monkey picture in my own house.
In a sense, then, this NFT thing is like those “name a star” services that are all horseshit. (Such things have nothing to do with the IAU.) I can pay those guys to pretend that 51 Ophiuchi is called Eddie Vedder. If they then put that in a blockchain, now I own the “right” to call that star Eddie Vedder. If I can convince rich people that this blockchain means something, I might start a star-naming craze and have celebrities pay a fortune to name stars. Why not, right? It’s no sillier than monkey pictures. But you can’t stop people from going outside and looking up.
This is, in general, false. Owning an NFT means that you own the NFT, not any rights to the object that the NFT points at. You are perfectly able to create an NFT of the Brooklyn Bridge and sell it.
It’s not enforceable and no one cares only because no one knows. If Disney knows that I’ve got a bootleg DVD of Star Wars or The Avengers sitting in my DVD player, they are going to come after me.
Of course, your example is vague. In some places, the law says that if you have purchased a song, then you have the right to transfer that song onto other media for backup and personal use. So, if you paid for the song on iTunes, then you may be in the clear, depending on where you are.
If you did not pay for the songs, or otherwise legally acquire them, then you are breaking the law in whatever way that you use them.
I was a very early user of Napster, and used it all the way up until it got shut down(and turned into something entirely different). I never got caught while I acquired music that would have easily cost me thousands of dollars to purchase, does that mean that what I did was legal?
What harm did I do to the copyright owner in getting music for free that I wouldn’t have paid for if I couldn’t get it free?
I see Warhol’s Campbell’s soup cans referenced on mainstream internet sites quite often as fair use. That doesn’t mean that they aren’t copyrighted, that doesn’t mean that I can (legally) print them off and put them on my wall. Sure, no one would know, and as long as no one knows, no one will care, but not getting caught breaking the law doesn’t make what you are doing legal.
I don’t know that they would laugh him out. If he can’t show damages, then he may not get compensation, but you could still be instructed to remove your copy from your wall.
If he were selling these images for people to put on their wall, and instead of paying for it, you simply printed out an unauthorized copy, then some damages could be assessed. I don’t see why the DMCA wouldn’t apply to such unauthorized use.
BMI and ASCAP are not laughed out of court when the file lawsuits against individuals and businesses who violate copyright laws. Even when they are pressing multimillion dollar lawsuits against children.
Bit of local drama. The high school jazz band would come in on Sundays to the coffee shop next door and practice performing. They did this for a while until a BMI rep showed up and threatened to sue them and the coffee shop. Jimmy Fallon may not hold his copyright to his monkey pic seriously and zealously defend it, but that doesn’t mean that all copyright holders will be so lax.
Difference is, no one can own a star, and no one has the right to declare an official name for a star. This is different from owning an image of a monkey. You can own the image of a monkey, and legally control its distribution.
It will be interesting to see how the legal system weighs in on this in the future. If I am not breaking any law by using unauthorized copies of an NFT, then how can I be breaking a law by watching an unauthorized copy of Frozen?
Like I said previously, I don’t see NFT changing the legal framework of copyright or ownership, but simply making it easier and possibly more secure in proving and transferring those rights.
Are you sure that’s the case? Is it always the case?
Yes, and I can take a picture of the Brooklyn Bridge, and that photo is now my intellectual property with which I can do what I like. I can move it into public domain, I can transfer the exclusive rights to someone else, I can make and sell copies.
What I can’t do is take a picture of a Warhol can of soup and sell that(and actually taking a picture without permission is illegal as well).
Depends where you live, but they went after the people and organizations that distributed, or facilitated the distribution, of music.
No one can own an imaginary monkey. You absolutely CAN own the right within a given blockchain to say that a certain star is named after you or that a certain monkey picture NFT is yours. If I sell that right to you, and you pay me for it, that digital signature is yours, just as legally as your car. It is every bit as much yours as a monkey NFT. A blockchain item can be an NFT, or Bitcoin, or any conceptual thing. It’s that part of the blockchain that you now own.
“In general” does not, in general, mean “Always.” So no, it’s not always the case. But also, NFTs do not intrinsically grant legal copyright over the image in question. That transfer of rights is handled by the exact same sort of contractual transaction that occurs if I sell you the copyright of an image I created without any NFTs involved at all. You’re conflating a legal system of ownership that already exists and works just fine as-is with blockchain and NFT technology, which only works as a system of ownership insofar as it’s supported by the already existing system.
The problem with an NFT is as Reno Nevada Jr. pointed out: While an NFT can provide proof of the chain of ownership, no such proof of ownership is required to mint an NFT. I could mint an NFT of my art, or your art, or anyone’s art and because of the distributed nature of the system there’s no direct recourse against this. This, in fact, happens a lot, so much that DeviantArt provides a tool that lets artists search for stolen artwork on popular NFT marketplaces. If you do find your art has been stolen, there’s often not much you can do about it. If the art was sold, don’t ever expect to see that money. Artists get the best results by filing DMCA claims on the marketplace, or if that doesn’t work sometimes the images are hosted on servers run by Google, who will abide by these claims. That doesn’t remove the NFT, but it removes the art the NFT was tied to, making it theoretically worthless.
Indeed, the one field in which NFTs have truly revolutionized ownership is theft. Before, digital art I own the copyright to could be stolen and used against my will and I could take legal action if necessary, but I could not lose copyright over my art. Now, NFT owners can get their wallets hacked, their NFTs transferred, and truly lose ownership of their monkey pictures against their will. Perhaps law enforcement will be able to seize the stolen goods and return them, but that’s just another example of how centralized authorities will be required to support these supposedly decentralized systems.
Ignoring the fact that as established in this thread, there isn’t really a way to make a banking-proof currency, the way to have a hypothetical banking-proof currency work in the actual economy would be nonsensical.
The currency couldn’t actually be used in every sector of the economy - the most extreme example I can think of is food production or other natural resource-based sectors - you can’t actually produce food for 7 billion people (and more every day) without banking and insurance. You have to take too much risk up front. There’s a reason banking predates capitalism by thousands of years. So we would all have to hope that some asset-holders would stay in the traditional economy so we’d all be able to eat.
So really the only hope would be that you could have parallel economies where normal asset-holders put enough money into banks that they can finance everything that goes on in the world that isn’t feasible to be funded by some kind of crypto scheme, and the people who would rather trust their finances to their thumb drive to their bank can just be doing whatever outside of that except when they need to buy things from the normal economy.
One thing on NFT’s I’ll say is that hypothetically, if there was a way to tie an NFT to software in a more secure way than the licensing that goes on now, that might actually be a practical application. However, that would require a legitimate technological development much more significant than any of this crypto stuff. Making unique tokens is the easy part - the hard part would be creating some kind of scheme to prevent people from cracking the software and using it with a completely fake license.
I don’t quite get this. I know that this (the blockchain) is how crypto and NFT work. I just don’t see how the blockchain gives anything value. It’s like if someone invented some way of proving that the Monopoly money my friends and I use on game night is authentic Monopoly money. Even if the technology can somehow prove that, and even if everyone I play with are 100% on board with believing those results, we still only have Monopoly money, which doesn’t have any real value outside the game other than as kindling.
So there are things that only exist digitally that have value - like software that companies sell with licenses. Hypothetically if there were a way to actually tie these to an NFT in a secure way there would be some value in proving ownership.
Of course at that point it wouldn’t be an investment because it would become nakedly obvious that the value is capped whereas something with made up value can be “worth” whatever you can convince people it’s worth, and you would also have to deal with all the other technological problems that crytpoworld hasn’t figured out like how to actually make the whole thing more efficient than a centralized system.
The obvious comparison here would be casino chips and vouchers. They are laden with security features, at least at higher denominations; a $100 chip has ultraviolet markings and whatnot. They are not easy to replicate. Somehow, however, I doubt that if I walk into a Walmart in Indianapolis with a bunch of $100 chips from Caesar’s Palace they will accept them as money - even though they could return them to Caesar’s and get cash.
What makes those chips worth $100 is that somewhere along the way, someone gave the dealer at the blackjack or craps table a $100 bill and the dealer then gave that person a chip marked as being worth $100. Having UV markings, an RFID chip, video evidence from the eye in the sky of the exchange taking place, or whatever other security measure are used, aren’t what make that chip worth $100. Those things might give a gambler confidence that the casino will give them a $100 bill in exchange for that chip when they decide to cash out, but that’s not where the initial value of the chip comes from. Similarly, the blockchain isn’t what gives bitcoin and NFTs their value. That’s why I don’t understand the claim that the blockchain is what gives bitcoin its value, anymore than if someone were to claim that those security features on a casino chip are what give them value.
Or, for that matter, saying that what gives an actual $100 bill value is the anticounterfeit features built into it. Hell, GOLD isn’t valuable because of its physical properties (well, not mostly; gold does have physical properties other metals do not that makes it far better suited for use as money. But it’s still mostly valuable because people have confidence in it as a medium of exchange.)
Exactly. That $100 bill has value because someone spent 10 hours flipping burgers at McDonald’s or provided some other good or service that has value to other people. Bitcoin doesn’t have any underlying services or goods of value that back it. That’s why I think it’s a bubble that will eventually pop.