Hacker News Reader

Comment by laurencei | Hacker News Reader

One use case I was wondering for NFTs; would it make sense for photographers?

So if I took some "amazing" photos of stuff, whether it was art, landscape or 'stock' style photos. I could list them on a website to be sold, and sell the NFT of the photo.

Yes - anyone can "right click -> copy" the photo, but we are talking about the licensing side of the photo. This proves the person using the photo(s) in their product or website etc has the "right" to use that photo, in the same way open source projects have licences that people are expected to follow?

The person who bought the photo could on sell those rights at a later stage if they no longer wanted to use my photo (since anyone can sell the NFT).

Basically shutterstock.com or something, but with NFTs? Its about the only genuine use case I can think of...

View on HN

I think this is kind of the idea, but it has basically the same problems as other areas. You're relying on meatspace legal and copyright systems to associate "ownership" / "right to use" with the NFT, but you could just use that same system to associate those rights with the purchaser directly.

The only tangible different is that once you've establish the meatspace laws, the ownership can be transferred on chain and still hold a valid claim, instead of having to result in meatspace in order to transfer it.

If you want to transfer ownership (copyright) within the traditional legal framework, you’ll also loose your say in what happens next, so you can’t guarantee that a subsequent change in NFT ownership automatically means a change in ownership of the rights.

What you could do is retain the copyright yourself, but accord an open-ended copyright license (like the way oss licenses are written) that accords certain rights to the owner of the NFT (and have the license describe how to determine who is the owner of the NFT).

This is the value of blockchain in a nutshell. Programmable trust. All manner of tokens (represented things - both digital and not), can be moved, modified, leveraged, etc. It is a public ledger and api for trust. Probably people still under-appreciate the utility, liquidity, and overall productivity boon this will be.

But we already have a mechanism for licensing, its copyright.

NFTs provide no new tools or even solutions for tracing, enforcing or indeed arbitrating licensing of a thing. Its just a hash. Photo stock sites already have perceptual hash tracing.

However for them its useless as they only ever sell licenses to use the artwork, not "ownership". They still retain the original copyright, which allows them to sell licenses to use the image/sound/thing

> Its just a hash

NFTs aren’t even a hash, they are a URL.

IPFS urls, widely used, are a hash. Media data is also sometimes stored on chain; sometimes code is stored that generates the artwork.

One problem that I have noticed in the NFT space is that the platforms only deal with transaction between wallets, not persons. The association between wallets and persons is tenuous (by design). You don't know if you are buying from the real right holder (e.g. the author), and on the other side it is difficult to prove that the owner of a particular wallet is you.

How does this improve upon copyright in practical terms? Because finding out who the rights holder is becomes more straightforward? I’m not aware how minting an NFT works exactly, but wouldn’t the person to whom the NFT points still have to prove they’re the rights holder and have engaged in some legal contract for that claim to be valid?

Here’s a general issue I don’t yet understand yet for NFT’s.

Suppose you take an amazing photo (or create digital artwork), and pack it up as an NFT on platform A using token/blockchain technology Alpha. Alice buys this token, and has some sort of limited ownership of your picture.

I (a nefarious user) take the same digital photo you displayed on your website, and sell it to Bob on platform B with blockchain Beta.

I also take your digital photo, make some minor alterations and put it up again on Platform A with Blockchain alpha and sell it to Charlie.

Alice, Bob, and Charlie all think they own the picture, and while they do own their own versions, how do we know Alice is the “right” owner of your photo?

Especially in the future when you’re not around to confirm the version Alice has is the right one?

No, you understand it well. NFTs are completely divorced from anything that does not exist on the blockchain. All recourse for establishing ownership in the eyes of the law requires consulting external, centralized sources of authority, making the involvement of a blockchain utterly pointless.

Sign the pixels?

No crypto expert but I was thinking something like this:

Artist decides to make a run of 100 copies of the work, and generates 100 work signing keys and generates a list of "1/100, work public key 1" etc. Artist then signs this list with their artist signing key, gets a signed timestamp, and publishes this somewhere on their site, along with the public portion of their artist signing key.

Artist then signs the (uncompressed) pixels of each copy of the work using the corresponding work signing key. Signature is embedded in the image file along with the work copy details, "1/100", say as a PNG chunk or similar.

NFT is created for the work copy, and I'm presuming there's something akin to a signature of the image file in the NFT to link them.

If you then get a NFT you can verify that the image file is indeed what the NFT refers to. You can download the work public key from the artist and verify that the public work key is from the artist, and then verify that the work (pixels) is what the artist signed.

Then again I don't know the domain enough so might be completely silly and or flawed idea. And obviously it requires a non-lossy image format ala PNG.

it still doesn't solve anything. You have no way of knowing if the pixels were originally signed by the real artist or not.

The only reason it works right now is because that NFTs are so recent that you can just send a DM to artist's twitter to verify if the original set of crypto keys/wallet belong to them. When the artist himself is promoting it, it's not hard to figure out if it's genuine or not. But what happens in 10 years or if you can't trace the original artist?

How would you know if I took the picture myself or if I stole it from flicker? if reverse image search doesn't work, it would be impossible.

That's no different from a real picture/painting though is it?

Regardless, if you get the current verifiable statements signed by a trusted entity every now and then, you should be able to verify the trust chain, no?

Before the old keys expires you get someone to verify and sign with a new key, rinse repeat?

what you are describing just proves that the blockchain adds absolutely no value to the art. You still have to rely on a piece of paper on which someone pinky swears they are the original owner. The blockchain doesn't make it more secure in any shape or form and you would have absolutely no way of knowing the picture I'm selling as an NFT was taken/created by me or stolen from reddit.

You publish your public keys along with the original photo which correspond to the "true" accounts on any chain.

If we're doing cryptography, then why go through the blockchain at all then? I could sell the original private key I used to sign the picture to somebody, and they can prove their ownership all day long. I don't see the value add of a fancy database.

You can't sell a private key because you can't provably delete any potential remaining copies you might have. You could continue to sell the private key to others.

Artist still could sell the same artwork multiple times on a single or multiple exchanges. Or someone could steal their keys and sell the artwork multiple times.

> I also take your digital photo, make some minor alterations and put it up again on Platform A with Blockchain alpha and sell it to Charlie.

That's the same as making unlicensed prints from a manipulated copy. That's a copyright violation. The physical world doesn't protect you from that either. You need to sue either way.

Yes, but that's not the point We're trying to find a use case for NFTs, a problem they solve. But there doesn't seem to be one, at least not one I could find in this thread

There would be a record showing the original author put it on the blockchain first. After that’s on there nobody else can remove it.

This could be used as evidence of their authorship in court.

“Look, here we have a tamper proof ledger showing I uploaded this at X date before it was copied.”

So now the race to prove ownership is to upload it to a blockchain first? If you publish your art on deviantart but while you’re uploading it to the blockchain, I sneak in first and upload it, suddenly I can say that I have a tamper proof ledger showing that I uploaded it before it was copied by you.

Kind of. It would be desirable to put your work on the blockchain before anyone else.

There are other things people could consider though, in terms of evaluating the history/authorship of something. The blockchain is just one data point.

So the blockchain doesn't solve evaluating the history/ownership. Not even.

Is anything really solved?

Suppose someone scoops the artist’s work and sells their artwork first, without their permission?

Eg, I recently saw the “Charlie bit my finger” family will sell an NFT of their video. Is there anything stopping someone else from selling NFT’s of other viral videos before their makers do so?

Timestamping would only work for works that are tokenised at the same time as (or prior to) their public release.

When you take someone to court over a copyright violation having proof that you control a wallet that was the first to have minted an NFT representing the work in question would be one piece of evidence that you may be the original author.

If there is other evidence, e.g. the other party has a YouTube account which uploaded a video years ago of the work, and is publicly known to be the author of the work, then the judge will probably rule the NFT is not sufficient evidence of ownership/you are not the copyright holder.

There is nothing technically stopping people uploading NFTs of things that they don’t own the rights too. That won’t hold up in court though, not even the court of public opinion.

How do you check who was the first in practice? Blockchain is large and will grow larger. NFTs hold URLs not hashes, so the same artwork could be represented by multiple hashes. The url could also point to a different artwork now compared to what was there before.

This happens all the time. What is worse is someone minting someone else's art, and then the buyers starts posting takedown requests to the original artist. Amongst others, this happened to Simon Stålenhag of Tales from the Loop fame...

This isn't really an issue with NFTs though. It's an issue with people being dicks.

True, but the people requesting takedowns are under the impression they own the thing...

This happens outside of NFTS, this happens with everything, US dollars, physical contracts, licenses. They can all be faked. NFTs actually do a better job at allow people to identify fakes, lmao. Do better research.

There is nothing wrong with my research. I reported a fact. OP explains how NFT doesn't solve these problems. But it also confuses a lot of people about what it means to own something.

It will be an issue when NFTs are being used as the only source of truth instead of a judge making a decision based on multiple factors.

Simple: Have the government recognize NFT ownership and enforce it. Perhaps that's the future of blockchains: Automated records for the masses enforced by central government, with courts to provide exceptions.

Yeah - I wondered about this exact issue too.

Same as all the NFT "artwork" I see around. Why cant I just literally copy and paste the artwork, maybe change one single pixel, and re-mint it?

But aside from re-minting it with alterations, you can mint the exact same digital artwork on different NFT platforms, so how do we know which platform is “right”?

> so how do we know which platform is “right”?

The right one is the one the original author of the artwork released it on. The thing about NFTs is the connection between digital items and their authors.

If you're like most art collectors you'd follow the author anyway. You'd buy one because you're a fan of the author and enter their nft sales funnel.

This doesn't address the problem either. How do you know which platform the original author released it on? How do you verify who the original author is? The answer: by consulting a trusted external source. Which raises the question, if we're involving a trusted external source, why not just use that source to track the token rather than involve a blockchain? NFTs are a solution in search of a problem.

> if we're involving a trusted external source, why not just use that source to track the token rather than involve a blockchain?

How would this work?

Well, you don't. Things don't have identities, not really, and so all the superstructures built upon such concepts collapse the moment when demonstrating this dirty philosophical secret becomes practical ― and digital entities are perfect for such demonstrations.

The simple answer is provenance and blockchain provided this much more than the physical world.

The old world analogy to your scenario is you go to a museum and take a picture of an Ansel Adams work, make a print and try to sell it to Bob. Why would bob pay for this. you have to convince him it's a real Ansel Adams.

Same thing with NFT. You would have to know artist on alpha is real and beta is not. It's non trivial but again I don't think it's actually that different from the real world today. NFT does not attempt to solve this part. Instead it let you check that the nft you're buying is from alpha and the original artist.

The difference here of course is that you can perfectly reproduce the digital artifact, you can't do that with the Ansel Adams print.

I think whether its perfect or not is irrelevant. You can make a high enough quality one that Bob wont know the difference. Same with any traditional art like paintings. Forgeries are not impossible.

So basically a current-owner database for some list of products, maybe a brand?

There's simple ways of running such databases that don't require blockchain.

Photographers (and digital artists) commonly already use something called a “Certificate of Authenticity” or COA, a physical document signed by the artist verifying that the item is one of a batch, and that the batch has a fixed, limited size.

NFTs aren’t providing anything beyond what a COA provides, and the COA comes with a physical handwritten signature. Neither is any actual protection against determined forgers. As an occasional artist and photographer, I wonder if the solution to authenticating and valuing digital art is to sell the copyrights along with only a single digital and/or physical copy of the art, and then delete it. Make it unique to the buyer the same way a sculpture or painting is unique.

Yes. Except NFTs, for one reason or another, have introduced a whole new set of people to the idea of paying for an COA; they are suddenly really easy to buy, easy to sell, and the ledger creates a community of owners who recognize each other's COA as meaningful.

That's incredibly powerful; because a physical COA in my cupboard that none of my friends gives a shit about is less interesting.

how does this help with enforcement of the license terms? There's no technological enforcement, so lawyers would need to be brought in... if legally the nft had the same standing as a regular license contract.

So I claim this is worse than a regular license because you have to jump through crypto hoops that most people don't understand.

Adobe just integrated this exact functionality into their suite. NFTs to prove provenance, and embedded in the child product. It's pretty neat.

That proves that the published picture was run through Adobe suite and nothing else.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com