As far as enforcement of property right, the "distributed" model is well understood and typically leads to a much worse situations than the centralized version.
A significant potential and likely harm is enough to consider preemptively regulating.
Some of these blockchain applications are essentially proofs of concept waiting for a legal framework to support them. But until that framework exists, it doesn't make much sense to use the applications for anything that involves real value.
I.e. when my photographer took photos at my wedding I signed a contract that I "own" those photos and all those rights. I can move then, alter them, back them up, sell them to getty, or whatever.
If I draw a piece of art, even digitally I own the copyright. I sell it to someone and now they own it and inherit all those rights...
Is NFT just simply creating a "Block Chain" for this? and if so... is it even needed? What value do I gain from using a NFT over you know a signed PDF that would actually be backed up in court if it came to it?
Is the vision that there is some hot market place for art and other assets that are traded so frequently that we need a live 24/7 market and exchange for them?
Sort of. You can and people have sold digital art (note this is not the same as owning the copyright) with contracts before, but NFTs make it accessible in a way that inspired a much larger group of people to participate (and yes, speculate).
Where things get a bit complicated is that the NFT just grants you ownership of the NFT itself and nothing else. The interpretation of what the NFT represents happens completely outside of the system.
The NFT is thus not a replacement for a contract, but a way to move that contract into a digital marketplace.
For a practical example, take the difference between DVDs and buying a streaming movie on Amazon. If Amazon would sell digital movies in the form of NFTs, people could buy them. If they want to watch the movie, they show Amazon that they have ownership of the NFT and Amazon lets them stream it. When they are bored with it, they can sell the NFT to somebody else and then the new owner can show that NFT to Amazon to proof ownership and watch a stream of it.
Now in reality, this isn't how NFTs are used (yet?). The way NFTs are used right now is really more like trading-cards. Little novelty things that people might see value in, pay for to support the creator or just do money laundering with or whatever. Most NFTs do not give you access to anything, as whatever they are associated with is already in the public anyway.
The NFT does not represent copyright or ownership of the item it points to, but it has the technical capabilities to do so when the right legal paper work is attached to the NFT.
I still don't really understand the logic of all of that, but I understand how it on paper would work. It'd kinda be like when you get a coupon for a free object from the store. Store fulfills the order and sends cost up to manufacture.
Another reason would be that game developers and movie studies start to sell media on their own. So the store would just be a service to download your games from, not the only source of your games. If all the stores stop carrying the media and the studio went out of business, archive.org or similar could take over, as the NFT proofs ownership and you don't have to wait 90 years until copyright expires. Right now we have the situation that some games are already impossible to get legally, as no store caries them and used sales of digital goods are impossible.
Finally, it wouldn't be Amazon starting this, they already have their market dominance and no need to improve the service, it would be the newly arriving competition that would start doing this. Amazon would then have to follow suit to not fall behind. Somebody like Epic might be big enough to get this going and they don't seem to be fundamentally opposed to NFTs.
This is of course all just wishful thinking, but we really need a better way deal with copyright in the digital world. Having media just get lost for 90 years due to there being no way to buy used really isn't acceptable.
On the other hand we already have "copyright without enforcement" for recorded music, via file sharing.
Disclosure: I have 20 patents.
It's still worth at least chatting with a patent lawyer (which I'm not) to make sure what you think is sufficient as a defensive publication, actually is.
Some people seem to think that, perhaps misled by words like "trustless" that are applied very narrowly to blockchain technology.
But the reality is there's almost nothing about blockchain that helps with these trust issues. If I order a physical product and pay in advance with crypto, I have no recourse except a legal one if the seller doesn't deliver. You can set up escrow systems but then you need to trust the escrow provider, and you still need to somehow deal with hard to verify claims like "I didn't receive my package."
That's just one example. In almost every area in which blockchain is "an experiment in what can be accomplished without laws and enforcement," you'll find the actual situation is that it's a learning exercise for those who don't understand why laws and enforcement are needed - or, a way to avoid laws and enforcement for those engaging in illegal activities.
> A decentralized patent system without enforcement was previously something we could only imagine, but now we can try it out.
How? Put your invention on a blockchain and anyone can copy it without consequence. The primary purpose of patents is lost without enforcement.
At the end of the day every thing that is truly "enforced" is ultimately enforced by violence.
I can promise that if patents where enforced only by social contract they would be meaningless. Larger corporations do not care about their social relations, but do care if you can have the legal authority to punish them for infringement.
You can write your contract on a napkin and if someone is willing to hurt someone else (materially, physically or otherwise) for violating that, that contract will be enforced.
This is just one of the many cases where the block chain, while interesting technology, has very few uses because there are very few cases were we have a problem with the media the contract is written in rather than the overall enforcement of the contract.
Perhaps they seek to hype it up to become the operators of the monopoly of violence in this frontier?
When someone inevitably hacks the shitty solidity code and steals your stuff you don't get to cry to twitter or the police
Five of my friends agreeing to share a dirt bike is a social contract after all.
We can also see that many blockchain projects actually rely on more mundane social contracts like our legal system and governments with actual terms and conditions, registered companies and the like.
If you think NFTs are going to radically alter social contracts around ownership on a wider scale I've got a lovely plot on the moon to sell you.
In reality, at the moment a government had authority over those under it.
So perhaps this idea of social contracts reveal both the aim (destroying of society, hype and illusion to create communities) and the weakness (government, monopoly of violence, status quo)
I thought the social contract is what people do. :) Is it there if it's disregarded?
Or rather what is the social contract supposed to be around NFTs?