Hacker News Reader

Comment by interblag | Hacker News Reader

This is probably a cliched comment by now, but it never ceases to amaze me how quickly many crypto users appeal to centralized authorities as soon as they accidentally lose ownership of an asset. From one of Seth Green's linked tweets:

> Got phished and had 4NFT stolen. @BoredApeYC @opensea @doodles @yugalabs please don’t buy or trade these while I work to resolve

Just a continuous, incredible endorsement of the fact that in certain situations intermediaries, however imperfect, are actually very desirable...

View on HN

Everybody wants to be an ancap, until it's time to be an ancap.

Yeah, if these people had any integrity they wouldn't lean on the legal system to solve their problems. This case highlights the core problem with NFTs, that being you cannot have digital property without some kind of enforcement in the real world. Since there is currently no known mechanism for truly trustlessly connecting the blockchain to the real world (oracles don't count, they are trusted third parties) then the rights supposedly associated with these NFTs are effectively unenforceable. IMO Seth Green should just continue with his dumb show and if the owner of the NFTs wants to sue for copyright infringement they will be forced to reveal themselves to the legal system and open themselves up for all sorts of problems.

And if you're depending on licensing of actual IP rights, you should have a real contract, not a 'smart' contract.

Strangely I think that might actually be less of a concern with BAYC? From the article:

> A growing number of NFT projects are granting owners the right to commercially adapt their works, which has been a useful strategy for increasing brand visibility but has consequently introduced a host of legal disputes. Bored Ape Yacht Club was among the first to adopt these terms, which led to an explosion of Bored Ape merchandise and derivative NFT collections but also set the stage for bitter copyright lawsuits.

IANAL though, and also "bitter copyright lawsuits" doesn't sound exactly like where you'd want something like this to end up :)

Unless the BAYC contract permits some party to deem a transfer of the NFT illegitimate and reassign the IP rights back up the chain, it's just as much of a concern. As illustrated by this very story.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com