Someone downloaded 80k Winamp skins and is now selling them as NFTs | Hacker News Reader

Someone downloaded 80k Winamp skins and is now selling them as NFTs

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>The person has been reported

reported for what exactly? for selling a certificate to an URL?

Genuine question- my understanding is an NFT has no legal rights and no legal connection to whatever real thing it's a token "of".

Therefore, does existing copyright even consider an NFT as any sort of derivative work? It seems to me like anyone could sell an NFT of anything. If you say "this token on this blockchain is for fans of (copyrighted thing)" or "this token on this blockchain represents (copyrighted thing)" can the copyright owner stop that sale?

NFT itself doesn't contain any copyrighted material, so it's rather not a derivative work. It's technically a URL with extra steps.

On a technical level NFTs seem to be completely separated from copyright. Even if they weren't, people making them could try to claim it's Fair Use (a transformative work or merely referring to a work).

But it really needs to be tested in court. I wouldn't be surprised if the judgement depended on whether the seller says "buy this artwork" vs "buy this token of an artwork" or details like that.

It also has interesting connection to "link tax" laws. News orgs are lobbying for laws to make linking a some form of copyrightable use, to get Google to pay for linking to news articles. If NFTs linking to copyrighted material get a legal status, it may set a precedent for other types of links.

I think an NFT is a statement about a hash of the item, which is a derivative calculation of the item.

I don’t know exactly what the problem is. Who cares? He’s written a very long thread but he doesn’t explain how this hurts anybody.

You can’t sell work/software made by other people, it’s not legal (and it’s stupid). In example, form the Winamp website TOS:

> 1.1. The contents, lay-out, source code, structure and any and all other elements of www.winamp.com are © 2021 by Winamp, its affiliates, successors, parents, subsidiaries, assigns and licensors (hereinafter referred to as “Winamp”). All rights are reserved.

>1.2. Without limitation, no parts thereof may be reproduced, communicated, altered and/or used in any way whatsoever without the prior and express approval of Winamp

It's highlights the gap between what NFTs are said to be (paying artists, owning artworks), and what they are (get rich quick off other people's content).

In this case authors of the skins aren't getting paid anything. Copyright situation of 80K files found on the Internet is also going to be a mixed bag. It may create a few paradoxes where people who paid for an NFT don't have any legal right to use what the NFT links to.

You don’t get to sell other peoples work, so in this case whatever money the seller makes doesn’t belong to them, it belongs to the copyright owner. With penalties of course

...correct, but you think that who is selling them will give the money to the Winamp devs?! Anyway I don't think is possible to sell NFT of copyright materials owned by others without consens.

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