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For what it's worth, there's no way you can force every image manipulation tool and library to respect the NFTs, and the NFT can't necessarily point to a specific item itself (since the location it points to could move), so there's no permanent effective way to actually make those two connect.

As far as I can tell, the only thing that NFTs might be useful for is uniquely identifiable assets whose unique identification can be embedded in the NFT itself; for example, a car's VIN number or a property's address or lot number. Unfortunately, we already have much more effective and well-regulated systems to handle both of those situations, and I'm at a loss for any circumstance in which an NFT would be better and also guaranteed effective.

The NFT could always be self-referential and point to the hash of the image itself which would be accessible on IPFS or another content-addressed network.

not if you cropped it in the webside and (like in this case) don't have the original files.

Just for thought exercise:

If github wants to add NFT to support its users to monetize the users generated contents, how would github do that?

Or how might a special NFT/PDF reader sw enables the PDF creators to monetized their creations?

You could use a perceptual hash, which would work as long as you had the entire image in any format.

>"I legally (and most likely naively) bought a stock photo CD but did not have that in my possession any longer"

Explain exactly how pissing away all that electricity by burning all that coal and generating all that carcinogenic pollution and greenhouse gas would have caused him to not lose the entire original image just like he lost the original stock photo CD?

> For what it's worth, there's no way you can force every image manipulation tool and library to respect the NFTs,

Correct. But the license owner can require the license buyer to use editors that preserve NFTs or be subject to automated DMCA notices. Once Adobe and Apple start respecting the NFT-copyright-format in their tools, other commercial vendors will be forced by the market to support it too.

Again, I'm not in favor of any of this. Just admitting that I am pessimistic enough to see where all of this could end up eventually.

That’s a lot of extra steps instead of just using a format with DRM.

extra steps, that summarizes everything related to crypto

That already exists with physical money. There are a lot of printers and scanners and software that will not copy 20 dollar bills.

In theory you could add all of NFT Images into the software but what happens when someone creates an NFT of a basket ball. Are you going to stop people from printing any picture with a basketball in it?

yeah but why does that need to be an nft and not just a centralized application that serves that data via an api?

the license holder could require license buyers to use editors the preserve the claim via that centralized application?

It doesn't need to be, but it could turn out that way. Perhaps someone convinces the masses that a distributed blockchain is preferable and then it gets built and persists on first-mover advantage.

You could one way hash the asset, along with the initial resolution and other characteristics, and lock that data in the NFT. As long as you have the NFT, and the original digital work stores somewhere to rehash, you could prove ownership.

> But I still think NFTs have a future as digitally signed proof of ownership of media assets.

NFTs are not proof of ownership, because anyone can create an NFT of anything. I can create an NFT of my neighbour's car.

They are proof of ownership if you trust the originator of the NFT, in this case it would be someone like the photographer or Getty.

But if you have to trust the originator it's not a "proof" is it? A proof is something that can be demonstrated to be true.

I think it's pretty clear from the proposal that the only relevant NFT for some piece of digital media would be the NFT created by the original copyright holder of that piece of digital media. For example, Getty could issue NFTs for a particular stock photograph.

Obviously any random person could create an NFT and claim that it represents ownership of a particular stock photograph, but that's not really relevant or problematic. You could also create a traditional paper certificate of title for your neighbor's car too, but obviously no one would respect it (unless they were tricked, but that's against the law and the legal system would tend to respect that genuine certificate of title).

Brilliant! So what you are saying is that NFT’s are a good documentation of ownership… if we assume some other system takes care of documenting that the NFT was in fact created by the owner. So you know if we have some other system to track ownership.

For a lot of stuff that's really not a hard problem. You just create the NFT of the hash before publicly releasing the item, it's only for stuff that exists out there in the world already that's a problem. Doesn't mean it's not a good way to resolve stuff going forward. Biggest problem with NFTs are how they integrate with the existing legal frameworks of copyright, etc.

If Getty signs an asset saying chime bought it at 'getty.com', that's proof enough. If I buy it at totally-legit-stock-photos.example.com, then it's on me to resolve the matter with Getty when they say my NFT is invalid. Getty's crawlers can still go around the web looking for stolen images. But if the images have a signature from a different vendor, then instead of just going after the gullible users, they can go after the signers. And if the images do not have any signatures, they keep doing what they've been doing already.

Copyright is big business and big business is copyright. Disney could absolutely start signing all of their media with NFT and every license holder would have X years to implement it properly. After that they can automate takedown notices for any commercial site/platform that uses their non-NFT'd images. Right now they need to manually verify if the Hulk coffee mug on Overstock.com is using licensed images or not.

Your elaborate idea is defeated by screenshots.

> If Getty signs an asset saying chime bought it at 'getty.com', that's proof enough.

This is not proof enough. You don't know that getty 1) owns the asset 2) hasn't sold other "proofs of ownership" of the same asset to other people.

Both of those theoretical problems exist for physical paintings as well. You don't know that Salvator Mundi was actually painted by Leonardo da Vinci (maybe his gardener painted it and he lied to everyone saying it was him), or maybe he actually painted it several times. Perhaps one day we'll find evidence that the gardener actually painted it, or we'll find additional "original" copies, and suddenly the value of our current "original" will be reduced.

We were talking about ownership, not authorship. In the real world titles of ownership are issued by a trusted third party. They're not issued by the same party who claims ownership. But in the NFT world they are, and this means these titles of ownership can't be trusted. There's no way of assessing whether they're valid or not.

This doesn't really seem compatible with first-sale doctrine and how copyright around images works.

If I want to buy licensed Hulk coffee mugs from any source, and resell them, Disney doesn't have any rights.

Why not just sign the assets with a private key and verify its authenticity with the public key? What is the purpose of bolting a blockchain onto this idea?

> If Getty signs an asset saying chime bought it at 'getty.com', that's proof enough.

Great! We agree! People have been signing digital assets for thirty years now, and it clearly works well.

So why use the NFT?

> Disney could absolutely start signing all of their media with NFT and every license holder would have X years to implement it properly.

Or Disney could just start signing all their works _today_ without an NFT or blockchain of any type, using proven, decades-old, open source technology.

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The blockchain is amazing because it solves a very difficult problem - the consensus problem. Yes, blockchains are very expensive, but that's because they need to solve that hard problem. If you have a consensus problem, the blockchain is the only known solution to it.

Signing assets is NOT a consensus problem, because the origin of the idea of ownership comes from the real world.

When Disney signs their assets, it makes no difference what order they sign them in, or whether they sign them before or after someone else does.

For example, suppose Disney decides to sign everything, and then someone else "signs" Mary Poppins before Disney gets to it. Nothing happens! This signature has no legal, moral, or practical value to anyone: Disney _legally_ owns Mary Poppins and will continue to do so.

Or suppose a hacker breaks into the network and "signs" ownership of Poppins to Elon Musk. Again, this has no legal, moral or practical value.

There is no hint of a consensus issue, and therefore the incredible cost of a blockchain is completely wasted here.

No. If you are able to attribute identity in some way to the address that created the NFT then you can reasonably assume the NFT is legitimate. There are ways to do this. One can publicly declare (and prove) they control the address through a 3rd party system (Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, or some decentralized method). You can also determine based off the activity of the address itself (what and when it created nfts in the past) and make certain assumptions about the validity of a self-proclaimed identity. The address becomes the identity in a way.

You just repeated the same thing. That 3rd-party centralized system that's used for "identity" can just handle the ownership too. A decentralized NFT layer adds nothing when the ownership is still dependant on something else.

But ownership of anything is always dependent on something else. People can steal physical items from you. You can tell the police and maybe they'll return the item to you. But what if the police steal the item from you? These scenarios do not demonstrate that the notion of ownership is absurd.

You're conflating vastly different things. You still own something even if you don't physically have it. The concept of ownership is granted by the by the laws we are governed by.

Everything else is just recording those facts and transactions. That's why you can transfer ownership by writing it down on paper. NFTs are just fancy electronic documents. It's just paperwork.

> NFTs are just fancy electronic documents. It's just paperwork.

Yes, of course that's what NFTs are. Is someone claiming they are something else?

Yes, that's what the discussion is about. We don't need fancier paperwork, the existing records do just fine.

I’m not really interested in devolving the conversation into an argument over what it means to “need” something. We obviously don’t need NFTs in the same way we need breathable air and water, but this just isn’t an interesting discussion.

The point is that it adds no value over existing systems. You're all over the place here with your replies and it seems like it's disingenuous so I'll end it here.

Since you finally concede the obvious and undeniable fact that we need breathable air, then why are you disingenuously arguing for NFTs instead of against them?

What is the point of wasting so much energy, burning so much coal, and belching so much carcinogenic smoke and greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, if we can simply solve the problem much more efficiently and easily without wasting energy and destroying the environment and giving people cancer and heart disease?

And for what? I think the human race deserve fair use of the atmosphere, as well as pictures of Mickey Mouse.

What if the police steal your private key?

The point is we don't want to have a centralized authority determining and controlling ownership. The validation of the identity is at most what is desired, but really there needs to be a better way to do that as well.

We do, the "we" I subscribe to

> if we assume some other system takes care of documenting that the NFT was in fact created by the owner

What other system are you talking about? I could determine that you control the NFT of a digital work by observing the artist's statement of issuance and your message demonstrating control of the NFT on the blockchain. Determining the validity of the artist's statement of issuance could be done using public-key cryptography. I fail to see what additional system is necessary.

The "additional system" would be your first qualifier for ownership

> observing the artist's statement of issuance

eg: having an authority affirm your ownership of something.

The secondary system of using ownership of some piece of a blockchain is superfluous considering the first system is all you would need to prove ownership.

But the artist’s statement of issuance is not an additional system. I’m still not sure what other system you’re referring to.

The additional system is the trusted authority that is required to certify that the issuer is who they say they are and that they own the thing.

Again, there is no such trusted authority required when using technologies like public-key cryptography.

I repeat: "the trusted authority is required to certify that the issuer is who they say they are and that they own the thing." If you don't agree, please explain how a stranger's identity and ownership rights can be established using technologies like public-key cryptography without a trusted authority.

So we're back to the original question: how do we know that the person writing the NFT owns the intellectual property?

So if you're a famous artist, and I get your credentials and post my MS Paint doodles as NFTs, are these now original tshaddox's?

No, these would probably not be considered or valued as originals when the deception was revealed. No method of verification is perfect. You could also physically coerce the artist to issue an NFT. But this is not a unique “flaw” of NFTs. Art forgeries can also fool experts. People can steal physical items.

Sounds like you're describing an additional system.

I've been saying this for a while: in the absence of reproduction rights or some other thing of value attached to them, NFTs are a fancy system of provenance.

Precisely. When you license a digital asset, it has licensing terms associated with it - single entity use, multiple entity use, allowed form of media etc. Getty would sell me a new NFT for any asset I want to license and embed that signature in the asset I download.

Even if current NFTs don't support everything, the blockchain algo could be extended incorporate the needs of the parties involved.

And how do you associate a given NFT as being issued by the true owner of a real-world asset? The answer: by trusting a centralized external authority to verify the association. And if you're already trusting that centralized authority, what's even the point of the NFT?

Can you determine the authenticity of a physical painting, or would you trust experts?

That's not related to this at all.

Of course it's problematic. That's why most countries have land and vehicle registries managed by a trusted authority. If people had to rely on titles of ownership issued by random strangers it'd be chaos.

Contracts only hold power because of the government which can adjudicate and enforce the laws.

How those contracts are written, whether it's on paper or on the blockchain, is the least interesting part of it all. NFTs add no value that existing recordkeeping cant already do (usually much better and faster).

> I think it's pretty clear from the proposal that the only relevant NFT for some piece of digital media would be the NFT created by the original copyright holder of that piece of digital media.

So in order for the NFT to work, you need some sort of way to identify the copyright holder before the NFT even exists. Don't see you the issue?

If you can identify the copyright holder of a work without an NFT, what's the point of the NFT?

I'm a big proponent of blockchain. But technically blockchain is overkill for this application. At least for non-exclusive perpetual licenses, like the stock photo example.

Blockchain gives you three things. 1) Censorship resistance (no one can "lose" or forget about the license). 2) Protections against mis-spend (no one without the private keys can grant the license). And 3) Protection against double-spend (in the case of two grants, we have a universally agreed upon history of which came first).

A non-exclusive license only requires the first two. You can satisfy the problem with digital signatures and a censorship-resistant P2P file share like IPFS. Comparatively putting data on the blockchain is fairly expensive. Even with sharding O(log(n)) nodes have to store the data, whereas with IPFS only O(1) do. On Ethereum, every kB of storage costs around $5. If you don't need canonical sequencing of history, then blockchain is probably overkill.

Transferring ownership of an NFT would not work just with digital signatures and IPFS, though. I could sign a transaction saying "I transfer this NFT to you", but unless you trust me or some authority, you have no guarantee than I don't just resign it and transfer to someone else as well.

Let me show you my fine collection of prime numbers!

Seconded. I see no point in "buying" media from stores where my account can be terminated immediately. If I bought an NFT token that encodes the right to use some copyrighted work, this issue doesn't exist.

Imagine a future where you can engage in completely legal torrenting of copyrighted works, where all sides have NFT proofs of ownership. Owning an NFT would mean you own the notarized right to download a copy as well as to seed it to other torrenters who can cryptographically prove they own the same NFT.

> Imagine a future where you can engage in completely legal torrenting of copyrighted works, where all sides have NFT proofs of ownership. Owning an NFT would mean you own the notarized right to download a copy as well as to seed it to other torrenters who can cryptographically prove they own the same NFT.

Thank you! You get what I'm talking about. Many folks here are replying to me as if I'm saying NFTs can prevent copyright infringements. That's not possible and not the goal. The goal would be to track ownership and handle violations more reliably than mass DMCA-notices that plague YouTube.

> Seconded. I see no point in "buying" media from stores where my account can be terminated immediately. If I bought an NFT token that encodes the right to use some copyrighted work, this issue doesn't exist.

As usual, you don't need a blockchain to do either of the two things you're talking about. For the copyright case, what matters is that you have a legal authorization which will be recognized by a court. An NFT can do that but so can an email or anything else — and the problem you're trying to avoid is a concern either way because the same people who require terms of use for their content aren't going to reverse course due to magical thinking advised by blockchain salespeople.

The secondary problem of unreliable cloud storage is similarly very expensively not solved by an NFT. Due to the inherent inefficiency of blockchains almost all NFTs point to a URL for the actual payload. If that hosting provider shuts down or restricts access, you have the same problem as you do now. Now, some people will say that IPFS solves this but if you've thought about the problem at all that is only a solution for content which is very popular and released under an open license: someone has to pay for the storage, even the few people willing to provide storage unpaid aren't going to do so for encrypted content which they can't access, and nobody who cares about access restriction is going to put it in a public blockchain anyway since they'd be one key leak away from the content being available without payment.

> As usual, you don't need a blockchain to do either of the two things you're talking about. For the copyright case, what matters is that you have a legal authorization which will be recognized by a court. An NFT can do that but so can an email or anything else

An email or anything else creates legal gray area. What if the email is from 20 years ago and the company that sent you the email doesn't exist any more? Do we know the email was authentic? Emails don't have cryptographic signatures. And even if, maybe their PGP key leaked. With an NFT, even if someone hacks the wallet of a creator and releases fradulent tokens, they are still trackable. The second advantage is the ability to sell the token. In NFTs, this is a builtin first-party feature, similar to your ability to sell DVDs. But how do you sell an email? How do you ensure that people didn't clone give the email to multiple people? If this problem sounds familiar, it is, it's the double spend problem, which various blockchains have found solutions for.

As for the cloud storage, I think it should be separated. NFTs can be set up in multiple ways. I propose to set them up as follows: a) you can prove cryptographically to others that your wallet contains an NFT and b) the legal framework of the NFT gives everyone the permission to give copies of the work to anyone who has given them a proof after a).

This move would create an entirely separate market for obtaining the work you have gotten an ownership title for. The barrier of entry for these services would be low, and some services can specialize for niche content, others can specialize for speedy delivery, etc. As the cost per work is quite low, I'd imagine a quite low price for these services. The most important advantage: one service going bankrupt wouldn't mean the loss of some people's collections. Especially, anyone would be allowed to host the content.

The single key leak issue is non-existent, because each single download is end-to-end encrypted via say TLS, but the download is only offered to accounts which have proven they own an NFT. Similar requirements are on torrenters, they too have to verify cryptographically that someone owns some content before they send it to them with a end to end encrypted ephemeral key. Maybe, for abuse prevention, there needs to be a record of the verification/download in the ledger as well, so that one can find people who lend out their wallets or something.

Can these issues be solved by a government run centralized registry instead? Absolutely, they can. In many countries, the govenrment runs a land registry already. Land registries share in fact many of the advantages of NFTs. The main issue I have though is centralization.

> If I bought an NFT token that encodes the right to use some copyrighted work, this issue doesn't exist.

This issue doesn't exist, because an NFT gives you absolutely no legal rights whatsoever - only the law does.

Absolutely, what I imagine are NFTs surrounded by a legal framework that ensures that the NFT actually contains a legal right. The NFT is mainly just the decentralized technical solution that can be used to prove you own this right. It's way more tamper proof than alternatives, like e-mail. And tamper-proof-ness works in your favour here in the case of a dispute, because if you then use it as evidence, it's very certain that you actually own the title.

Except there's no reason for that to be distributed and thus no reason for it to be an NFT.

You could accomplish the same thing just using signed files, or a hash in the exif.

The problem with the whole Blockchain business is what happens when a court declares something with violates the chain? You need to start keeping a user maintained list of patches, at which point why bother with a Blockchain instead of just having a trusted website?

> But I still think NFTs have a future as digitally signed proof of ownership of media assets.

The NFT is only a proof of ownership of the NFT. You don’t own the artwork. If you want to buy the artwork you need an old fashioned signed contract documenting transfer of ownership.

They only function as proof of ownership if there is no dispute. Basically, it just confirms provenance. If an NFT is stolen, or a more original author/owner emerges, that will take precedence over the NFT in question at which point it will have to be reissued.

The immutable nature of NFTs and crypto in general doesn’t really work well in the real world where we rely on the ability to change things.

> But I still think NFTs have a future as digitally signed proof of ownership of media assets.

Except NFTs don't "prove" anything.

The only form of proof of ownership of media assets is legal.

If I have a legal document proving that I own media asset X and you have an NFT, you will be in the cold.

| NFTs have a future as digitally signed proof of ownership

Why do you think handwritten signatures have gotten us so far?

Because the literal act of signing something is the lease important part of contracts and trust relationships.

Automated signatures work decently when the process is smooth. XCode integrates with your Apple ID to sign apps. Letsencrypt works for signing TLS certificates. HDCP works silently even for typical users.

I don't support HDCP or DVD-region-lock but they worked for the copyright owners without inconveniencing the users enough to affect the bottom-line. It's the technical users and hackers among us who have a problem with these.

I'm not looking forward to NFT everywhere for creatives, I'm saying I can see it happen. I don't want to sign every JPEG I edit but if the tools preserve the source signatures, it wouldn't really affect me.

Photoshop has had counterfeit detection system for over a decade. I'm sure Adobe would love to offer Getty + CS Cloud NFT-copyright integration if they can make it work. I'm sure they can come up with a catchy marketing name for it and build an ecosystem to license, edit, and distribute media with detailed tracking of every asset.

But those are for automated systems, more akin to a keycard than a contract for ownership.

NFTs explicitly do NOT grant ownership to the underlying asset though. You are purchasing the NFT itself, and nothing else.

They could, though. The original owner could assign ownership to whoever the bearer of the NFT happens to be.