Hacker News Reader

Comment by joering2 | Hacker News Reader

Fun fact: if you read Crypto Kitties TOS [1], you can clearly see that you really don't hold any copyright rights at all, all art is owned and protected by Dapper Labs Inc., and - the best part: you are NOT allowed to make more than $100,000 in gross revenue per year (ii. Commercial Use part) from your, erm, "ownership."

I'm still scratching my head... what do you actually own???

https://www.cryptokitties.co/terms-of-use

View on HN

You own a token.

Fun fact: if you buy a painting or a sculpture, that doesn't usually give you the right to reproduce it for commercial (or any other) purposes either.

Like a CD or DVD or indeed software license then. I am not surprised.

Purchasing the original vs a reprint would.

No, purchasing the original does not grant you the copyright. That stays with the artist unless they explicitly sell it.

Just to show you how untrue your statement is: if you get a tattoo on your body, you don't own any rights to that tattoo -- the tattoo artist does. The tattoo artist of Mike Tysons face tattoo receives royalties anytime it's shown in marketing or on TV.

If you are an actor, the tattoo artist must grant permission to the production for the tattoo to be displayed (otherwise it must be covered up.)

It's no small irony that cryptocurrency has seen a rise in Great Reset-esque reactionary thinking (as part of their spiel against traditional finance) while simultaneously debasing "ownership" more than any traditional economic shift I can think of.

cryptokitties is from before NFTs came about isn't it?

They are still NFTs (arguably the first well-known NFTs), as they follow the ERC-721 token protocol.

its one of the first (or maybe the first?) NFTs

> I'm still scratching my head... what do you actually own???

Short answer: nothing.

You have the key to a part of a specific blockchain. Only you control who gets to change which wallet that part of the blockchain lives in, because only you have the key.

You don't "own" anything in a legal sense, unless you consider that part of the blockchain being associated with your wallet public key to indicate ownership.

NFTs are only useful as long as the people with an interest have the same ideas about the implications of the blockchain as you do. If you, and your friends, and your customers, and the stores you shop at, all decide that whoever holds the private key to a part of the blockchain owns that information (AND have that in writing somewhere, AND live in a place where that mere piece of writing is enough to transfer ownership of IP) then the person with the key owns the IP.

Anyone can set up their own blockchain. Anyone can take every NFT on the ethereum blockchain, grab the data, and add it as an NFT to their own blockchain, in their own wallet. The only reason this doesn't mean anything is that nobody respects your blockchain when it comes to ownership. Just like the blockchain speculators, NFT speculators decide on which chain is useful for their purposes and attach some kind of inflated value to that in the hopes that they can buy low and sell high to other people who hope to do the same thing.

Now I think this is very interesting when it comes to blockchains forking: who really controls the bit of information if one blockchain splits off into two or more blockchains? Which one is the authoritative one?

Edit: the website of the Bored Ape Yacht Club says the following in their TOS:

    i. You Own the NFT. Each Bored Ape is an NFT on the Ethereum blockchain. When you purchase an NFT, you own the underlying Bored Ape, the Art, completely. Ownership of the NFT is mediated entirely by the Smart Contract and the Ethereum Network: at no point may we seize, freeze, or otherwise modify the ownership of any Bored Ape.
    
    ii. Personal Use. Subject to your continued compliance with these Terms, Yuga Labs LLC grants you a worldwide, royalty-free license to use, copy, and display the purchased Art, along with any extensions that you choose to create or use, solely for the following purposes: (i) for your own personal, non-commercial use; (ii) as part of a marketplace that permits the purchase and sale of your Bored Ape / NFT, provided that the marketplace cryptographically verifies each Bored Ape owner’s rights to display the Art for their Bored Ape to ensure that only the actual owner can display the Art; or (iii) as part of a third party website or application that permits the inclusion, involvement, or participation of your Bored Ape, provided that the website/application cryptographically verifies each Bored Ape owner’s rights to display the Art for their Bored Ape to ensure that only the actual owner can display the Art, and provided that the Art is no longer visible once the owner ofthe Bored Ape leaves the website/application.
    
    iii. Commercial Use. Subject to your continued compliance with these Terms, Yuga Labs LLC grants you an unlimited, worldwide license to use, copy, and display the purchased Art for the purpose of creating derivative works based upon the Art (“Commercial Use”). Examples of such Commercial Use would e.g. be the use of the Art to produce and sell merchandise products (T-Shirts etc.) displaying copies of the Art. For the sake of clarity, nothing in this Section will be deemed to restrict you from (i) owning or operating a marketplace that permits the use and sale of Bored Apes generally, provided that the marketplace cryptographically verifies each Bored Ape owner’s rights to display the Art for their Bored Ape to ensure that only the actual owner can display the Art; (ii) owning or operating a third party website or application that permits the inclusion, involvement, or participation of Bored Apes generally, provided that the third party website or application cryptographically verifies each Bored Ape owner’s rights to display the Art for their Bored Ape to ensure that only the actual owner can display the Art, and provided that the Art is no longer visible once the owner of the Purchased Bored Ape leaves the website/application; or (iii) earning revenue from any of the foregoing.

Do note that reselling the NFT does not necessarily follow the same terms, so you might end up with a situation where someone owns the NFT and someone else owns the IP.

The terms of sale seem to hand over all the IP and rights to the buyer, but then continue to later restrict those rights. I don't think you can have your cake and eat it too in that sense, but it'll depend on the jurisdiction where a violation might occur.

ii and iii sound revocable if the country Yuga Labs is in puts sanctions against the NFT owner.

Somebody else owns the IP regardless of who owns the NFT, but you're saying that the license is also separate from the NFT?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com