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Comment by atlantas | Hacker News Reader

In the current system when an artist creates something and sells it, they typically get paid once, often lowballed. The buyer may turn around and sell it for 100x. The buyer made far more than the artist, who gets nothing in this scenario.

With NFTs the artist can get a cut of every transfer indefinitely.

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Almost all art sold is only sold once. The figure I've seen is 0.5% of paintings bought are ever resold. Most artists would be overjoyed at someone flipping their work for 100x, because their future sales now look better. It is similar to gallery commissions, where 40% of hardly anything is a bargain and 40% of a lot is worth every penny.

Physical art typically doesn't get flipped that much, especially art from artists that actually need support.

> With NFTs they can get a cut of every transfer indefinitely

How does that work?

Also, what is to stop people copying it anyway and what is to stop artist from getting underpaid?

All serious questions that I'd like to see answers to but don't understand how NFTs would solve any of them.

Royalties are built into marketplace smart contracts. Individuals can do P2P trades where the artist doesn't receive any royalty but this doesn't happen very often. Anecdotally, it typically only happens on large deals and people who do a P2P trade often send the artist their royalty anyway (but still benefit from not paying the OpenSea fees for example)

Not sure what you mean by the second question

Wait, so the purported royalty benefit of wrapping this in a contract can be circumvented, but the NFT tech is still good because people who circumvent this kindly send the artist the royalty anyway? Would they not be able to send the same courtesy royalty if no NFTs were involved?

Not what I was trying to say at all, I'm saying that NFT tech is good because the default option is that the artist gets royalties and this happens probably >95% of the time?

I think I felt compelled to mention that people send it anyway because it's good behavior and not all scams/crimes people say it is. In general I think the royalty thing is just one nice bonus of using smart contracts

please see “ideas on a shelf”

Idiomatically, "shelved ideas". Shelving can be more abstract, but generally it's not idiomatic for abstract-concepts to be "on a shelf".

Language aside, I think you're being inconsistent with that concept: there are better solutions for compensating artists than NFT's already, so it's inconsistent to say that you want active-solutions as a justification for working on an less-active-solution.

I'm replying specifically to "Would they not be able to send the same courtesy royalty if no NFTs were involved?" which absolutely there is not already a satisfying solution in place. No thanks for the language lesson

Ownership transfer is done by a function call. The function often has extra logic like % of the funds for the transfer going to the artist. I guess you can cheat by sending a small amount in the transfer and seperately paying the seller the rest but then you make the thing you bought seem cheaper in the official records so that's in most cases counter-productive.

So I guess the next goal here is a startup to implement this as a smart contract to go full circle. The market will do it because any transaction fee is a hindrance to it's liquidity and is a possibility to undercut someone else.

Oh so it's a pyramid scheme as well? What a horrible payment system. Imagine if whenever you sold your car you had to take a fraction of what you received for it and give it back to the dealership (or rather, the manufacturer in this case).

That's still beneficial to the artist as it usually raises the market value for the rest of their work.

That's not always true. German copyright law, for example, includes a right for artists to a cut of the proceeds for auctions in the secondary market.

This is what I mean by idea on a shelf - this idea doesn’t have mass adoption momentum and is also not accessible to less established artists

> With NFTs the artist can get a cut of every transfer indefinitely.

Too bad this hadn't been invented when Ted Nelson was alive.

You scared me. He is very much still alive. (Or do you know something I don't?)

Huh. I distinctly thought he'd passed. Well, I'm very glad to be wrong!

I wonder what he thinks about this potential enabling technology for transclusion.

Not in every jurisdiction. I would look at Droit de suite [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droit_de_suite

No you're assuming based on what seems like no knowledge of the industry.

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