On the Impending Deletion of Charlie Bit My Finger

I came to the comment section to better understand what's the opinion on NFTs too :)). I could see some edge-case uses with these NFTs, but I feel a lot of its usefulness is exaggerated. In my opinion, anything that's digital can't have its access enforced once out in the public. Only laws can restrict an agent (humans, usually) from gaining contact with the digital asset if it's public (or out in the public by any means, be it a copy on the internet or a CD, HDD, card etc.). I keep thinking my opinion is wrong and there's something magic about these NFTs that I didn't understand.

I have trouble understanding NFTs too (article author here).

The closest I’ve come to understanding them is this: an NFT is an abstract handle to which various rights can optionally be attached. So (in theory) it becomes an easy way to have a marketplace for those rights, and this previously hasn’t been simple for digital assets.

In this case, one of the rights attached to the NFT in the sale is that the counterparty may choose whether the YouTube-hosted video continues to be public. (And, in this case, I would argue that the specific YouTube endpoint is almost as significant as the video itself.)

NFTs remind me of 'buy a star' companies.

You apparently 'bought' a star but anyone can look at it, I imagine that multiple people own the same star and everyone is none the wiser.

I assume this is why NFTs work. Make someone pay for 'exclusivity' (real or not) and then just assume that most people won't look into the details, where the devil is.

NFTs make money laundering and tax evasion exponentially easier than traditional collectibles. They’re also a new enough thing that asking for forgiveness after getting caught just might work.

There’s also the get-rich-quick aspect. A lot of the same reasons people “invest” in crypto. Exclusivity, novelty, and a lot of really naive traders flush with crypto cash.

So they have no rights to use the video.

I'm not sure what the difference to this and an NFT I made of say the Mona Lisa or a Vincent van Gogh painting.

I can explain this - a lot of people miss the point of NFTs so I can illustrate the value here.

Buying an NFT is kind of akin to buying an autographed photo (so in this case, the person has paid the money to buy a signature from the person who shot the clip originally).

If you buy a signed photograph from Taylor Swift, you don't own the rights to Taylor Swift, her likeness, or even that photograph - but you still have a photograph that Taylor Swift herself (probably) signed. You don't care if someone else uploads the same signed photograph of her or she sells the same signed photograph to thousands of other people. It doesn't matter - because you wanted a signed photograph of Taylor Swift.

Would anyone really pay $760,999 for a hash that references a YouTube clip and expect that they then "own" the video because they have the hash? Of course not. No-one is that naive. They just really wanted an autograph from the person who made the video, and thought their signature worth $760,999.

Does it matter if it's not worth anything to anyone else? No more than it matters to a Taylor Swift fan if other people are not as excited about the photo they could have looked at for free but decided to pay $760,999 for.

As long as the buyer is happy with the autograph, and the understanding that it provides no rights whatsoever and is likely not worth much to anyone else, what's the problem with them spending SEVEN HUNDRED AND SIXTY THOUSAND AND NINE HUNDRED AND NINETY-NINE DOLLARS for an autograph from the Charlie bit my finger dad?

Now, you may think to yourself that almost $800K USD is a bit much for a single autograph from a person that shot a YouTube video one time that got popular by random chance, but you have to remember that no matter what happens that buyer is going to be telling their grandkids one of two really interesting stories on their deathbed that both centre around that autograph.

I think of NFTs like a digital receipt.

I get the impression that the folks spending a lot on NFTs are using some kind of crypto coin to pay, and that crypto coin may have a certain dollar valuation now but had a much lower dollar value when they obtained the coin. In other words it doesn't feel like they are actually spending the dollars, the effort to obtain those coins was less than the effort to obtain the actual dollars.

Could the owner of the NFT own the copyright to the video? If so, buying the NFT would provide the right to sue people who are violating that copyright, right?

This is the big question I’ve yet to find a solid answer to about NFTs. First year law students are taught that property rights are a “bundle of sticks”[1] but I have absolutely no idea which “sticks” (if any?) an NFT conveys.

[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundle_of_rights

> Admittedly, the copyright situation is a bit less clear though.

Well, according to Wikipedia, an NFT is a piece of data which acts as a proof of ownership, (essentially like a deed from a notary public) "that is separate from copyright".

As for copyright, that's clearly about exclusive rights of authorization (per the Berne convention) which are protected on the part of the original creator. In this case, the original creator was the Davies-Carr family who first made the home video and uploaded it to YT.

https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-57227290

The difference between analog art and digital art is "uniqueness". That is, there's one physical original copy of the Mona lisa handcrafted by Leonardo Da Vinci, and it hangs in the Louvre. Sure, there are millions of printed copies of the image on the canvas, but the true value of that particular copy is that it's the first rendition of the image of the Mona Lisa in the physical world. The closest you can get to that in the digital world would be the storage medium that contains the original file as it was first created (I suppose that would be the home recorder of the Davies-Carr family).

So, NFT, in this regard, is about establishing "ownership" of the original copy. Pretty much like an art collector wants to actually own the original first rendition, as made by the artist.

What wasn't sold here is the copyright. It's the ownership of the particular copy which was uploaded on YouTube.

Barring extending any license of intellectual property to the buyer, the exclusive rights that authorize who gets to make a copy, and publish that copy online,... are still firmly in the hands of the Davies-Carr family.

This is an important distinction since it might bite art collectors: buying a work doesn't automatically imply you also own the copyright to that work. On the contrary.

> Presumably the video will become public domain at some point

Under UK law, that would mean: 70 years after the death of the original creator. Depending on the age of the Davies-Carr family members (and wishing them a long and healthy life), "Charlie bit my finger" won't enter the public domain before 2100.

Copyright in the digital era is massively problematic as most content copied and shared online is almost invariably violating someone's copyright.

Sharing a copy of "Charlie bit my finger" via a torrent isn't violating the rights of the person who ends up being mentioned as "owner" in the NFT. It's essentially violating the rights of the original author which are, presumably, still the Davies-Carr family.

Put more succinctly, the Davies-Carr family could be entirely cool with someone asking them "Hey, I have a copy of your video, okay if I upload it back to YouTube?" and the NFT owner can't do a single thing about it.

So, by now it should be clear what the actual problem with NFT's is.

What you hope to buy is the experience of owning an original piece. In the analog world, this carries quite a lot of different layers of meaning: this pertains to the idea of having the actual canvas, rope, paint,... hanging off your wall; but also the story tied to the particular physical object: it's tribulations as it survived history, the fact that it has an established provenance and you, as owner of the object, becoming an inextricable part of the object's history. You'd buy art not just for the sake of owning, but also because you tie yourself to it's history, and it becomes a vessel that helps you transcend your own mortality (famous art collectors become part of the historic narrative).

As far as NFT's go, that's totally not the case. The buyer of "charlie bit my finger" bought a copy which merely resided on the hard drives of YouTube. Even that copy is arguably original as "Charlie bit my finger" has been with YouTube for years, and probably was copied / transferred many times over between Google's data centers. In the digital world, it's simply impossible to attain the same kind of "value" you'd get from buying an object in the physical, analog world.

... the only reason why someone was willing enough to pay $760k for this NFT is because they genuinely believe it's equivalent in value compared to buying on the analogue art market.

Probably the same way anyone does.

I wouldn't use this personally, but to me it's pretty clear that the use of 'quote-unquote' is meant to denote sarcasm more strongly than quotation marks.

The incongruence of NFTs is they basically require the state to strongly enforce copyright claim to actually have any value outside of bragging rights. A state with rigid, strong copyright enforcement is not something I personally value, and doesn’t seem to be the sentiment of people buying and selling these NFTs, so bragging rights it is?

The reason music got saved is, eventually, all signal gets transferred over two cables. It is simply not possible to gate it.

Video is much more complicated.

In theory, possibly? But for things like vehicles, and especially land, the existing processes work OK in the places where they are well developed, and where land registries are unclear, NFTs probably don’t help much because the bigger problems are things establishing who exactly is the owner and do you have an effective court system with fair rule of law. An NFT would also have to accurately describe the asset which gets trick with land since it tends to slowly move in places and at the same time old records remain important. Eg in the UK compulsory land registration has been rolling out since the 1920s and the register has existed for nearly 160 years, but title to something like 10% of the UK is not in the land register, and may never be.

No. As has been explored to death in recent articles, the last thing you want is the ability to irreversibly transfer ownership of your car or your home in seconds (and potentially accidentally).

When you have a deed to a car, states have well established laws for how the transfer of ownership occurs, and well established methods for dealing with problems in that transfer. If the deed to your car is tied to an NFT, and than NFT gets fraudulently transferred, it's irreversible absent recourse to the legal system to get a new NFT that represents your deed. And at that point you might as well just have had a normal deed.

Kind of feels like the start of a blockchain-specific Streisand effect, doesn't it?

I don't care about the video, at all, but now feel compelled to archive it just because.

Usually NFTs embed a canonical link to the media they're supposedly tokenizing. I would be very interested in what URL this NFT points to- if it's not a publicly available version of the video then what's it even an NFT "of"?