Comment by rattlesnakedave | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rattlesnakedave | Hacker News Reader

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rattlesnakedave

What?

You said "non fungible, transferrable data, the possession of which is easily cryptographically verifiable", but NFT advocates talk about ownership a lot.

I can possess all the bored ape JPEGs. So can anyone else in the world who can right-click or screenshot or download a .zip of them.

Yeah, but the ones who have their ownership verified on the blockchain are the owners. I’m not sure what the misunderstanding is. I can save any kind of art from the internet, but I obviously don’t own it unless I purchase the rights to it. NFTs are just a distributed way of managing that purchase and transfer.

> Yeah, but the ones who have their ownership verified on the blockchain are the owners.

Not legally, they aren't. I can take someone else's photo, put it up on OpenSea as a NFT, and it'll go through. I didn't own it. You don't own it. The original photographer still holds every bit of legal ownership, regardless of our possession of JPEG copies of it.

Sure. That’s not even close to the common case though. That’s a stretch edge case.

It's a clear example of why "I possess the private key for a NFT" does not infer ownership of the NFT's contents.

It's happened though, people have made NFTs of the art of various unaffiliated artists. It might not be the most common case, but it certainly happens.

Is it not? If you buy an ugly ape, does the creator actually transfer copyright? If not, you literally don’t own anything more than a piece of metadata. You don’t own the url (because the person who owns the domain does). You don’t own the jpeg (because that’s a nonsense notion). You don’t own the copyright. You literally just own a bit of metadata that references a url.

I haven't actually read the legal documents of NFT creation sites in detail, but given the general trend of digital content contracts, it is very likely that (even were the NFT itself not a copyright violation in the first place, as sibling comment describes) you are not the legal owner of the copyright in that NFT anyways. What you would instead own is no more rights to that NFT than, say, HN has to the copyrighted content I am writing in this textbox, which is something along the lines of:

> a nonexclusive, worldwide, royalty free, fully paid up, transferable, sublicensable, perpetual, irrevocable license to copy, display, upload, perform, distribute, store, modify and otherwise use your User Content for any Y Combinator-related purpose in any form, medium or technology now known or later developed

I actually did read a few (those that actually had them), and asked follow up questions in Discord. The view from the teams generally was no transfer of rights to the NFT holder, you have the control of transferring the NFT via smart contract and that is all. The NFT has a relationship with typically a piece of content (image, mp3) but what that relationship isn't actually defined.

What a particular platform does when it sees that relationship is up to them. If no platform does anything with that data then your NFT does exactly nothing.

> the ones who have their ownership verified on the blockchain are the owners

According to who?

Not according to the government. "Owning" an NFT doesn't give you any kind of reproduction or copyright rights.

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