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Comment by lottin | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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?

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.

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