Woke Up to an NFT of Myself
nivenly.com
nivenly.com
Now with an NFT you're not technically selling a picture and I'm still not entirely sure why someone buying an NFT of an open source picture makes any sense at all but it is kind of inherent to what's being sold, because I don't think anyone would pay the same for some random bits of information.
So while the photographer owns the copyright of a photo, they may not commercialise the photo without a release from the subject. The subject also can't be tricked out of their rights, so open ended waivers that contain text such as "every conceivable use of the image" are weaker than waivers that clearly outline the intended use. Those open ended waivers also can also be weak if the photographer had been using the images in one specific way for a long duration.
There are some grey areas here, especially for NFTs - would selling the NFT be considered a mere transfer of copyright or would it be the commercialisation of the image? There would certainly be room for interpretation based on the content of the photograph and for the value it was sold. Additionally the new owner would still be bound to the subject's rights, so if those weren't properly conveyed with the sale that can also raise additional problems.
It makes sense as some people right now are willing to pay for it, thinking they will eventually make a profit with that sort of "investment". It could go both ways. Those selling NFT might be successful at creating a sense of value (through big influencers, marketing...) or eventually fail only time will tell. Remember ICO? Which one wasn't a scam again?
NFT itself is an "art performance", since it make us question the notion of "value". What is value? Why this or that item, physical or digital is valuable? Resources are certainly finite as well as knowledgeable and skilled people, but value is often completely disconnected from any fundamentals in crypto.
It's crazy though how most western government are completely hands off when it comes to crypto regulation. Especially in Europe. In USA you see the SEC cracking down on a few crypto scams and suing ICO issuers.
Compare another recent speculative craze: some rare Beanie Babies are still worth a lot! (Valentino the bear is $1900 on eBay.) But most aren’t worth more than their value as a toy, about $5. What do common NFTs have that give them value when they’re not part of an active hype machine process anymore?
Most “common” art isn’t going to fetch millions, but a select few do. NFTs aren’t any different.
As for “off brand minters,” some people care a lot about provenance. I don’t and you might not, but that’s also why we don’t buy art worth millions of dollars. But some people do care, just like how some people care about collecting stamps or playing basketball. Some people like different things and obviously if you don’t like a particular thing, you’re not going to “get it.”
Yeah, but set aside the million-dollar ones for a moment and imagine you found a new kind of art which consisted of the "artist" printing out a single copy of someone's work, and selling the printout for $150-$10,000 each. This copy has not been authorized by the person who made the work. The technology to make a functionally identical printout is readily available, though there's some ledger that tracks it and it won't be registered as the same object as the first printout.
Would you say that the purchaser of this printout is investing money wisely, or foolishly?
Would you say that "artist" is a legitimate actor, or some kind of scammer, thief, crook, or the like?
I guess the lesson here is to restrict the use to the project that it's being done for and otherwise reserve all rights.
What portion? 90%? 1%? Do they also get a cut of the commission of future sales the NFT takes?
To me, it makes a big difference if the funds are primarily going towards open source projects Vs into the photographer's pocket.
It feels very awkward to buy these, though I'm not sure exactly why.
For those who fail to see stupidity when manifest, my earlier stupid comment may be substantiated by these new stupid comments:
1. NFTs aren’t decentralized because the thing being tokenized doesn’t actually live on the chain. I do wonder if this could even work given how slow chains can get.
2. NFTs don’t assign copyright, or for that matter, offer any native protection to the materials mentioned in the NFT.
3. On the contrary, NFTs are being used to remove information from the Internet which has been in the public domain. Further, as this article indicates, any material can have an NFT assigned, regardless of actual ownership of the thing being tokenized. This also indicated the “selling of the thing” is the use case, which is highly irrational.
4. Lastly, anything that is proposed to monetize “all the things” is just as stupid as saying all things may be improved by software.
If all things may be improved by software, we’re all in trouble and don’t even know it.
Your follow-up here is of course much more substantive and would have been fine to post in the first place.
I'd be downright embarrassed to have my public image be hawked as an NFT, and I'd be worried about other people assuming I actually endorsed it.
The FoOS project suggests one of the CC licenses: https://www.facesofopensource.com/licensing/
In other words, the photographer, who owned the copyright on a picture of the author (Kris Nova), minted an NFT on opensea.io. It sounds like Kris Nova was a bit shocked but ultimately, tentatively, supportive.
For people who maintain cryptocurrencies can only be used for crime, I would offer this quote from the post:
"""
I used bitcoin to pay for my HRT as a transgender woman when I first started transitioning in 2013. There was a bitcoin kiosk in Denver and that was the only way I was able to purchase estradiol on the underground pharmaceutical market.
"""
Hackernews loves to hate on crypto, if there is any part that should be hated on its nfts. Because they're a giant worthless scam.
- NFTs to manage licenses for digital works. Portable transferrable licenses would solve many of the evils of walled garden IP platforms (ex amazon video or itunes), especially if cross platform. I refuse to "purchase" digital content in a way that I'm subject to arbitrary platform rules and threat of my library disappearing: it's all effectively renting with fraudulent UI labels.
- Media use licenses: I'd love to be able to buy an NFT for use of a song, 'point' the NFT at a youtube URL and that makes the video live and youtube would exempt me from their content ID system destroying my work with erroneous IP claims. If I get bored with my video, I could resell that license to someone else. Performance rights and public viewing rights for theaters could also use a similar system. It's currently very hard for a third party to independently validate a license, would be sweet if it was just an API call.
- Cross platform game items: ex. someone could create a P2P MMO where people can host their own servers and items are durable. Would take some thinking to make 'drop' logic fair across servers (can't create a server that drops every item after killing any mob), but I think it's a tractable problem if smart people put enough work and thought into it.
But yeah, buying a pointer to a URL which happens to currently serve a given image is a brittle ridiculous system that will likely come crashing down within a decade.
It can be "an NFT of that person". The NFT is the contract and the image, name and descriptions can be considered metadata. I think you're unnecessarily picky here: Strictly speaking, you're also not buying "a song of the Beatles", you're buying a copy/recording of an encoded piece of convoluted sinus waves or whatever.
Relevant art work: "Ceci n’est pas une pipe.", La trahison des images from René Magritte.
You can call them a scam but they're clearly not worthless.
Flipping NFTs can be incredibly profitable.
Just because there are currently people willing to pay a lot of money for something, and there are currently people making money flipping that thing, doesn't mean that thing will be valuable in the future.
Every time I see a discussion about NFTs, it seems people assume that other people value things the same way as them. It’s a major cognitive bias called naïve realism.
People value things differently then you. I literally pay more money for things made by bands I like, for example.
So assuming you've done your research, it is known up front to be worthless and yet you are buying it anyway with the intent to defraud someone else. Or you haven't done your research and you end up being the sucker in this setup. Either way, art NFTs are pretty definitionally a scam.
The word "scam" is thrown around far too much by critics of cryptocurrencies. Think what you will of bitcoin or ethereum, but neither one is a scam. NFTs, on the other hand, unequivocally are scams.
You can think of NFTs as being overvalued or worthless, but that doesn't make them a scam. Just don't buy them. Likewise, NFTs don't come with any promise that they gain in value, that too is on the buyer.
The better marketplaces include verification of authorship. Adobe is including proof of authorship into its suite of tools.
There's bots now crawling for knock-offs and cross chain mints.
So in the best of cases...if a verified author mints a verified work, which includes a copyright/usage statement, and I buy it...what do I legally own?
I think that's a question for the lawyers.
Heck I have old things that I want to get rid of but because no one really wants it, I can’t sell it for any price that’s worth the effort, despite being a physical item having intrinsic value.
> an NFT of myself -> an NFT of me
> on brand for myself -> on brand for me
> photographs of myself -> photographs of me
> Myself, and my photograph -> Me, and my photograph
> open source engineers like myself -> open source engineers like me
> He could have done a better job at reaching out to myself -> ... reaching out to me
Author actually uses correct grammar sometimes,
> I have invested literally millions of dollars into myself
> there is another one of his photographs of me
> lack of social awareness and missing social queues [sic]
> Do I wish he would take another photograph of me? Yes. I hate that face!
> I mentioned I had some trauma regarding my facial characteristics as a transgender woman.
If this aspect wasn't relevant, why mention it?
> Do I wish he would take another photograph of me? Yes. I hate that face!
It’s particularly difficult for the author I guess, because in the NFT they don’t pass at all. I can empathize with that on some level, even if I don’t agree with the politics of this person.
""" I agree with Peter.
I think he is well-meaning. Given the difficulties with publishing his book I can see why NFTs make sense. As an author, I can deeply emphasize with the challenges in publishing a book.
Sure – it could have been better.
Honestly I am just honored that somebody thinks my stupid open source work is valuable enough to put my face on an NFT.
- Do I wish he would take another photograph of me? Yes. I hate that face! - Do I wish he would have reached out first? Yes. But honestly I probably would have missed the email. - Do I think Crypto is here to stay? Absolutely. There are too many hurt, and traumatized young people in the world without a viable career path otherwise. Crypto isn’t going anywhere. - Do I think Crypto is bad for the environment? Yes. """
That’s a hot take.