Hacker News Reader

Comment by ToddWBurgess | Hacker News Reader

This. I know an intellectual property lawyer and was told without a legal contract in place there is no way to assert your property rights in a court of law. Legally speaking, you own nothing.

View on HN

That seems like a specific problem of how copyrights are assigned than the legal/NFT system itself. Bearer bonds are a thing. Are bearer assignments a thing? ie. "I assign the copyright of this work to whoever bears a certificate, or whoever bears a NFT?"

What's to stop someone from minting another NFT pointing at the same piece of data?

The same thing that prevents you from minting another deed that says you own the same piece of land as someone else.

A centralized authority and hundreds of years of legal tradition to resolve property disputes?

I was thinking of more "the courts". That's not in line with the crypto-anarchist narrative people like to think must be associated with NFTs, but I think having NFTs replace the complicated system we use to assign ownership today (eg. title searches/insurance) is a pretty attainable goal that doesn't require replacing the entire government with blockchain.

Not true. Someone could take an image that I've created, stick it on a server, create an NFT with a URL pointing at it, then sell it. Likewise, others, including me, could then create an NFT with a URL that points at that piece of data. The original creator (me in this situation) wouldn't have created the 'original' NFT.

NFTs don't solve counterfeiting when anybody can create a 'counterfeit' at any time.

> Not true. Someone could take an image that I've created, stick it on a server, create an NFT with a URL pointing at it, then sell it. Likewise, others, including me, could then create an NFT with a URL that points at that piece of data. The original creator (me in this situation) wouldn't have created the 'original' NFT.

Right, just like how you can make a deed that says you own 30 Rockefeller Plaza.

>NFTs don't solve counterfeiting when anybody can create a 'counterfeit' at any time.

never claimed it did, only that NFTs can potentially provide a better way to assign/transfer copyrights than the current system of paper contracts.

Maybe, but the closest I've heard of is contracts explicitly stating that the NFT doesn't assign any legal rights to the work. I'm not sure if the opposite exists / makes legal sense.

Right, my point isn't that most NFTs today grants you rights/ownership, just that it's not unfeasible for that to be a thing.

Is it, though? I mean if somebody steals your private key, does it make sense that that would give them legal rights / ownership to your NFT'd artworks? I'm honestly not sure if this is a thing, or a legally sensible idea.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com