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Comment by mrborgen | Hacker News Reader

I’m curious as to how NFTs will compare to a sales contract from a legal point of view.

E.g. if say an artist sells the rights to a digital artwork via both an NFT and via a normal sales contract. Both buyers claim ownership to the artwork and end up in court.

Who wins? And what implications will a legal presedence have for the vaule of NFTs one way or the other?

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Why would owning the NFT give you any rights over the goods? If I've understood correctly, you just own a token. It has no inherent value by itself anf you basically own a link to something.

The NFTs are meant to prove ownership over digital items, aren’t they?

Not ownership as in «I am the only one who can share this GIF in Facebook», but as in «I own the copyright to this GIF».

No, not really. (without license terms saying so not even the former, but those can be a thing)

If so, then it would actually be legally and morally ok for the artist to do a «double sell» as I describe in my original comment. It would be like i.e. selling a signed copy of a book to one person (the NFT) and the underlying copyright (the sales contract) to another person.

Morally is complicated if they are not transparent about that from the start - the social expectations around this are not fully developed yet, but preventing the holder of the NFT from displaying the work (by selling an exclusive license to somebody else) would probably be seen as wrong.

If there's no legally binding contract attached that you won't do it, then it should be just fine to sell as many instances as you want, no? In the absence of a contract you're just buying a unique tag, not the work itself.

If the artist sells the same exclusive right to two people, he's committing fraud and could do that without NFTs.

Yes, indeed. My question is if the NFT will be treated as a valid proof of ownership in a legal battle. I’m guessing it would hold some validity, but lose against a well-written sales contract.

You're either transferring ownership of the copyright or not. Hopefully that's clear when they're traded otherwise neither party will have any idea if they're getting completely ripped off or not. If it's not clear then you probably aren't. Though, some countries' copyright laws allow ownership to be transferred without being explicit about it through the (imo yucky) commissioned work exception.

What if the person who buys the art/NFT off the artist then sells the art to someone else but doesn't sell the NFT?

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