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Comment by vitorbaptistaa | Hacker News Reader

The difference is not in the original but in the copies. A copy of a painting can be a work of art, but it is different. It did not sit at the artists' atelier, it hasn't traveled through different places to finally hang at the buyer's living room.

That is not the case for digital works. If we get strict about it, everything apart from the original file sitting in the artists' computer disks are copies. The file you downloaded after purchasing your "original" is a copy.

But well, whatever makes people happy.

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> A copy of a painting can be a work of art, but it is different. It did not sit at the artists' atelier, it hasn't traveled through different places to finally hang at the buyer's living room.

Yes, and a copy of a digital work still has some value, but there's only one NFT that the artist issued to represent ownership of the digital work. These are precisely identical stories. Even if you could create a physical copy of a physical painting with arbitrarily high fidelity (perhaps at the atomic level), there would still only be one painting that sat in the artist's studio, and I suspect the art world would still only value that one as the original.

In other words, the fidelity with which one can create copies of an original work is irrelevant to the determination and valuation of originality.

Is a bronze sculpture an "original"? (It's likely been done by a professional foundry, that created a mold from the artists template)

Presumably the bronze sculpture was still produced with the authorization of the artist in a limited series and thus still represents their original work and intent. I think the key difference is that viewing a sculpture doesn't implicitly grant me a perfect replica of said sculpture that I would be free to save, duplicate, and even mint my own NFT for were I so inclined. Digital objects are not scarce in the way that physical objects are.

If the artist says their NFT (not anybody elses, the one signed by them!) represents (or is) their original work and intent, that doesn't count?

That depends. If that sculpture survived decades or centuries and then put on display in a museum far removed from the ability to recreate that sculpture from the original molds, then in a way, yes, it is an original.

However, if the molds are still available and another can be cast and finished, then no.

Still a specific instance of an unoriginal item might be special. It could have been painted post-casting by someone famous, or survived a war or shipwreck, and so forth. Originality is now no longer a distinguishing aspect of the sculpture's value.

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