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> BAYC transfers ownership of IP.

Does it, though?

> 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 of the Bored Ape leaves the website/application.

That's not IP ownership, just a conditional license, despite their talk of "owning" and "purchasing".

You posted the "Personal Use" section of their terms, and intentionally cut out what comes before and after it.

For anyone curious to read the full terms, they're here: https://boredapeyachtclub.com/#/terms

Can I mint the terms as an NFT or is that recursive?

Overview of copyright transfer.[1]

Full copyright transfer and licensing are not the same thing. The BAYC terms seem to be a sale of an instance of the Art, with a limited nonexclusive license to the intellectual property. An exclusive license is considered a transfer, but this isn't one. If you got an exclusive license, nobody else, including BAYC or OpenSea, could display the Art without your permission until the copyright runs out. BAYC didn't give up that much.

It's not clear that BAYC images are copyrightable in the US, because they are procedurally generated from templates. That will probably be litigated at some point.

There's an interesting trade dress question. Suppose you fed a supply of BAYC images into a machine learning system and had it crank out similar images. Does Yuga Labs have any claim against you?

[1] https://www.intellectualpropertylawfirms.com/resources/intel...

But you can already license your IP using a contract or a license, and that contract can be inked in paper or done digitally. You can even give exclusive license or transfer your rights. The only difference using the blockchain is, well, the blockchain.

This is an even less interesting use of the blockchain than Bitcoin - at least with Bitcoin there is no longer a central authority needed to prevent double spending. Here the blockchain is facilitating a transaction that can already be done without some authority to recognize it.

I don't care about bored apes or jpeg nfts in general, and don't know how true it is that you receive ownership of the ip.

But if it worked that way, then the concept is pretty cool. You say "you can already license..." yeah, but this is one click stuff and you're good to go. What you're saying is slow lawyer stuff and a fully manual process.

Of course this one click to purchase IP could be done centralized. But decentralized can add transparency, instead of relying on paper trail and companies that can go defunct.

Literally every stock photo site already does this.

But you can't turn around and sell that stock art to someone else.

You could if they changed the wording of the license being transferred.

Okay, so they don't actually already do it, but they could do it.

How would you keep track of who currently has ownership? How do you make sure I don't sell ownership to 5 people, or keep using it myself? Do I need to hire a lawyer each time?

Yes, this can be done without the blockchain. But also, does it matter to you if the code is in SQL or the blockchain? The blockchain is just a technology. (I do think the environmental impact is worth considering, for the record.)

Ultimately these are problems that just do not need solving. There is no real world use case to sell and transfer ownership of a stock photo multiple times.

Will it save lives? No.

But experimenting with copyright law is fascinating. It’s like saying, 20 years ago, that concepts like Creative Commons solves no real world use case.

I don’t think 5 years from now BAYC will matter. I do think, however, experimentation with intellectual property, copyright and ownership will.

Problem is it’s 1% interesting experimentation and then 99% scams, criminal activity, and destroying the planet.

I find that AI generated imagery is a much more interesting experimentation on copyright. Rather than trying to introduce scarcity to digital items, AI will destroy ownership entirely as anyone could generate their own brand new stock images on demand.

You can mostly use any and every one of them for a lot of purposes under fair use. I have seen a lot of Apes around the net, way more than I would have liked.

You can't make, say, a cartoon featuring one of them, but would you want to do that?

The apes were algorithmically-generated, and copyright applies only to human work, not program outputs (so that you can't run a program that generates all possible images and claim you own then all), so the kitsch apes are probably free to use for everyone anyway.

>BAYC transfers ownership of IP for the ape you've bought

>>"pictures of cartoon apes that are procedurally generated by an algorithm"

'Most jurisdictions, including Spain and Germany, state that only works created by a human can be protected by copyright.' https://www.wipo.int/wipo_magazine/en/2017/05/article_0003.h...

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/us-copyright-offic...

among a lot of other things:

> It's one character

no, it's one picture. some one else might own the rights to functionally the same character but with a smile instead of a frown or even just a different background color.

The only way this scales is that there are tens of thousands of "character" all of which are extremely similar, generated on a template and randomly arranged. None of them seem particularly iconic though I understand that certain hats etc are rarer than others. But none of them stand out as any sort of personality. So if you were to say try to make your own Bored ape restaurant a block away are you really standing out because _your_ ape has a nose ring?

At least Mickey Mouse has some cultural significance. Does anyone give a shit about these ape cartoons beyond the fact they’re NFTs?

Look at the parent article. The person quoted didn’t know what BAYC was; he went a few times a week because he liked the vibe.

Mickey had been around since 1928. I don’t think we’ll care about BAYC, specifically, but I do think it’s premature to say no NFT-based project will ever have any significant cultural impact.

Almost every human on the planet knows who Mickey Mouse is, and one corporation benefits. Aren’t you at least curious about a world where ownership of cultural icons is shared?

(I love Disney and hate NFTs so this is a weird position for me to be in, for the record)

I mean, Disney could sell the rights to Mickey if they wanted to, no NFT necessary.