An NFT minted by someone who doesn't hold the rights to the digital asset it is supposed to represent.
NFTs were advertised as a way for creators of digital content to monetize their work, but without some authority that verifies that the seller owns the copyright, the system cannot work...
If only there was a system, or an authority, like an independent body, that would do it's due diligence and verify the provenance of things... oh wait.
No, because it is possible to actively validate the initial conditions with reasonable effort.
There are in fact two initial conditions:
- Was the NFT created by person X? This is trivial to validate - check the artist's website for their key/wallet/signature, or ask your peers.
- Was an artwork (represented by the NFT) created by person X? This is equally as hard to validate as any claim to authorship, and something humanity has been able to manage for centuries.
Tens of thousand of pieces of digital artwork being scraped by bots from DeviantArt and monetized as NFTs is a problem fairly unique to our time.
How pointless.
This seems to be more about what people are imagining NFTs are than what they actually are.
yes, and how people are imagining NFTs is highly dependent on how NFTs have been marketed.
There is ownership, there is copyright, and NFT's doesn't actually say anything remotely conclusive about EITHER of those things.
In modern internet, free, high quality, copyrighted but not copyright enforced arts are something that can be sourced at rates of almost items per second, rather than months per item as was in days Da Vinci lived. That makes such frauds extremely easy, and million dollar NFT craze only helps justify it on every aspects except ethical grounds. So it's a problem.
Can someone explain at least what the theoretical solution to this is? Otherwise the whole thing just sounds like a scam.
For this to work, a blockchain needs to access something outside the chain i.e an Oracle... now you have two problems.
A notional monopoly on violence is important, but even in a police state it just isn't enough. You must achieve a broad consensus that, even if this isn't good, it's better than the alternative, and if that ceases to be true in the minds of a great many people their alternative is going to assert itself right quick.
You think most people living under an oppressive regime think that there's nothing the government could do to be better? Such a state doesn't need broad consensus that there's no better alternative, it just needs to avoid the consensus that the personal cost of attempting to achieve the better alternative is worth it. That's where the monopoly on violence really helps.
That hasn't happened because blockchains are a bad match for how people think of ownership.
No there’s no solution. Not until we all fully operate in a legal realm (the/a metaverse) that validates the contract and rewards the humans who created the contract to cover their own ass. If the contract doesn’t follow the _legal_ language and intent it’s not smart at all and yes it’s totally a solution in search of a problem.
this NFT stuff is doomed to failure until we all operate in the same realm validating the identity of the contract owner, validating the legal intent of the contract, because that’s what a contract is in meat space
Intellectual property is another thing entirely, and not as easy to enforce, especially in the digital age.
So, we need a contract to link an NFT to a work. That contract should also spell out all the things the NFT holder can do (maybe the creator didn't want to, or isn't allowed to, sell all rights).
So contract the says who owns a work and what they can do with it, enforced by a legal framework and the courts. That us all you need to make NFTs make sense, I don't see what the problem is.
What's that? If you have the contract, why do you need an NFT? Well, what scrub would buy a paper contract with bitcoin? It's not even on a block chain!
We have courts and lawyers and contracts. We need to use those to make NFTs work, so why are NFTs valuable again?
As with traditional artwork, the story of the work is what accrues value, not the work itself. You can create a largely undetectable forgery of a Picasso, but you cannot forge the historical record that traces the true work back to Picasso’s paintbrush. NFTs can make this historical record cryptographically secure, at least for the token itself, but whether that means the token should accrue value or not is up to the market.
The difference is subtle, but it is meaningful on edge cases such as around reward halving.
[1] - https://mirror.xyz/mattdesl.eth/eUrK8MrRfKFJYVKTwi5F4mCIBJEB...
? The owner of Dorsey's 'first tweet' does not have any 'rights' to it.
There are generally no 'rights' transferred with NFT sales.
Anyone can sell Dorsey's 'first tweet' by putting a given URL in the NFT.
The way we evaluate the 'legit' one is by tracing back to the original sale. So it's a matter of convention to determine the difference between 'real and fake'.
That's an inherent problem in the marketplace.
'It's marketed as way for content creators' etc. etc. just like Amway is marketed as a way for regular folks to sell cleaning products.
The difference being, the grift is so big, that everyone has to pay attention.
The systems may adapt and yield better mechanisms, but still, I'm wary that there is such a thing as a solution.
Indeed. But people want it to work that way, or even assume it already does.
The systems may adapt and yield better mechanisms, but still, I'm wary that there is such a thing as a solution.
Cf zmgsabst's comment[1]. That's an example of what I was alluding to, the arthouse being the authority that could make such a system work.
The authority can 'buy and sell' any kinds of 'rights' it pleases, today. We don't need NFT's for that.
The whole point of NFT's is that they are inherently distributed.
It's possible to create an NFT such that the NFT owner legitimately has certain rights, but that's another level of complexity, the rights may be different in any given scenario. Even if it were standardized, it becomes a management problem, for example, if the asset is licences out to other content creators, then the NFT becomes tantamount to owning a small IP business. Again there's not much value in the NFT at that point.
Some agency owns the copyright to some digital asset. It issues an exclusive usage license to the holder of the NFT, whoever that may be. The value the NFT provides is the ability to freely and verifiably trade the license without involving third parties. The value the agency provides is the ability for buyers to verify that the license is legitimate (and have someone to sue if it's not).
I have no idea if there's any worth to this in practice.
So you also have no idea if there's any worth to this in practice? We seem to be in violent agreement ;)
Except for the miners operating the network, who are involved third-parties. And the transaction fees, which make it not free.
You can have an NFT of the number 37 for example – it doesn't have to point at anything. It just needs to follow EIP-721 (a subset of ERC-20), or any similarly-worded standard.
> This standard is inspired by the ERC-20 token standard and builds on two years of experience since EIP-20 was created. EIP-20 is insufficient for tracking NFTs because each asset is distinct (non-fungible) whereas each of a quantity of tokens is identical (fungible).
If yall are buying leaf NFTs that cannot mint other NFTs, then I don't think you get to own anything other than the paper it's printed on. But that does not mean that NFTs cannot be used to own real things, or to enforce ownership of those real things (like a network, insomuch as a network is a real thing.) They can, and do.
I’m trying to think about even if the licensing issue would be circumvented or squirmed around.
An NFT pointing to the official image already uploaded officially elsewhere can neither be theft or copyright infringement, and fraud can be mitigated if it is written somewhere about who the copyright holder is.
> I’m ready to argue that its more like selling a TV to view existing content.
That’s a really nice analogy. The television is also a pointer of some sort, but that communicates the idea nicely and sounds less technical. And naturally move the focus of the discussion to the licensing of the aired content.
I might steal the idea for future discussions :)
If the NFT isn’t accepted by the intended on-chain contracts then it’s not authentic. In this context ‘authentic’ means that it will be usable for its intended utility, and contracts will identify whether tot hit has utility in their system based on which address created the NFT.
Instead of looking at the creator’s address all the time, incorporating Decentralized Identity can make the process more human-friendly.