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Comment by orf | Hacker News Reader

It’s not really ownership though is it. The tweet is Jack’s, he can delete it if he wishes. It’s more like buying a slip of paper that says you own this particular Picasso, but the person you brought it from still has full control of it and the only thing you can do is look at it through glass like any other visitor regardless of your slip of paper.

And the whole fake/original breaks down in the physical world. How do you tie it to the physical goods in a way that can’t be fraudulent?

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I think it depends, strictly ownership means owning the NFT token. By itself a token is just data.

Taking a step back the value of the token comes from Jack using the platform to mint it (which is purely off chain and you have to trust the platform verifies against the twitter apis correctly) and tweeting about it (again, off chain and you have to assume his twitter wasn't hacked).

Jack can delete his tweet but he can't delete a token that represents the tweet he sold. I can appreciate if you don't think this nuance matters but obviously there are some who think it does.

The same applies to physical goods. There's nothing stopping the original from being destroyed, your item being a near exact replica but if the interpretation that ownership of NFT is psysical ownership is accepted then you can't steal it and claim you are the owner without my private key.

> It’s not really ownership though is it. The tweet is Jack’s, he can delete it if he wishes.

Would there not be some liability in doing so? Legally the buyer does own it (it seems) and Jack simply has control over it.

First, is a tweet even a thing you can own, legally? You can own the copyright and you can enter into a contract where you promise not to delete it, but a tweet is ultimately something that is displayed and processed by, and exists at the pleasure of Twitter; they're not a party to your NFT shenanigans and therefore not bound to any of it.

As for the hypothetical contract not to delete it yourself, you'd probably have a good argument that there was no clear meeting of the minds - without an explicit description of what the author intended to be bound to by selling a NFT you'll have a hard time getting the courts to enforce anything about it.

What if I sell an NFT of one of my tweets that is subsequently taken down for violating Twitters terms? Am I liable? This whole concept IMO is absurd.

There's nuance to what it mean to "sell one of your tweets". What does it mean to own a tweet? What rights are you selling?

Ignoring NFTs you could define selling your tweet as:

* Selling the copyright to your tweet

* Selling the right to delete your tweet

Digital ownership is a new and nuanced concept that doesn't have good analogues. Ownership through public/private keys has no analogue and also feel absurd in any analogy using safes and keys.

This is really the problem, digital ownership outside of asymmetric cryptography is not well defined in law.

Digitally, it is perfectly clear:

You own the NFT. Through what is written on a tweet and a website it can be interpreted as the representation of Jack's tweet. You don't have any further owenship or rights.

I doubt it but we're also in uncharted waters. There are no technical definitions to own off chain items or legal rulings about what ownership of an NFT means for the off chain item.

As I explain in this comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26372130) there's a nuance between owning the NFT representation of the tweet and owning the ability to delete the tweet.

> he can delete it if he wishes

or by Twitter itself if Jack is at some point deemed problematic enough by modern puritans.

If he turns out to be a Nazi, sure. Probably for the best.

Whether it's for the best seems irrelevant, the point is that it is a possibility.

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