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Comment by 676234e117 | Hacker News Reader

I am a NFT proponent and this idea seems very broken.

The royalty model is working fine in NFT art world because people are not paying to see the GIF or PNG, it is already free to download it in high resolution. Anybody can right click and share it but nobody cares, if anything it can increase the value to have it replicated and shared. And also because most people buying art are willing to honor the royalty if it goes back to the original creator.

But people buy ebooks because they want to see the content, and they do not want to pay royalties back to Pearson. Especially students, they will just circumvent the payment and share the DRM free ebook and find ways of using blockchain contract wrappers to avoid royalties.

I do think there is probably a viable model for digital content like ebooks that involves crypto payments but this isn't it.

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I thought the NFT market, which is mostly art, plunged 90%+. And of the remaining, a number of them are still wash sales. Is that not the case? Or maybe I’m misunderstanding what it means for royalty market to be fine in NFT art world.

Sales volume has plunged from its early hype, but daily trades and activity remains higher than ever. In some corners of the market sales and royalties are still generating significant revenue for many artists, where prior to NFTs they did not have many options for monetizing their digital art.

Beyond monetization it has also spawned new digital art communities, meetups and conferences, exhibitions and art galleries, magazines and critical publications, and is generally continuing to garner interest within the traditional art world.

The NFT market is still doing surprisingly well, especially considering how poorly the traditional markets are performing.

I'm sure there are plenty of wash sales, but I know many, many people -- including myself -- that buy and sell NFTs on a daily basis and I don't have much problem finding buyers/sellers, especially with the new NFT liquidity markets.

Why do you buy and sell nfts on a daily basis?

I'm not really sure I understand what distinction you're making.

> But people buy ebooks because they want to see the content

People buy ebooks because (piracy aside) they have to in order to see the content. I'm not really sure how that's relevant in any way though.

> and they do not want to pay royalties back to Pearson.

Why would people want to pay royalties to an artist, and not to an author? I would actually agree with you, but I think people don't want to pay royalties full stop.

I do this funny thing where I buy an ebook and then turn around and.. uh.. "acquire" a copy of the same book.

The purchased ebook may never get opened.

A significant amount of piracy is not to avoid paying, it's to get a functional product that I can actually keep backed up and have across all my devices.

Ditto. I own a great many movies on physical media, and then have digital pirated copies that I actually watch. These digital copies are much easier to store, can be viewed on pretty much any device with no hassle or setup, and are easy to share with friends and family without depriving myself of my own copy. I already paid for a copy of the films once (sometimes twice!) so I don't feel particularly guilty about downloading copies for more practical use. If they want me to stop doing this they should provide a better service.

With a NFT of a GIF, you don't need to pay to see the content. People are not buying these tokens to see the content, because it is free for everybody to see.

What Pearson is suggesting is a different model: that you have to buy the NFT to see the content. This will lead to piracy, as most people will not be buying the textbooks for the token, but for the file it points to.

> Why would people want to pay royalties to an artist, and not to an author? I would actually agree with you, but I think people don't want to pay royalties full stop.

People usually are happy to pay and see royalties going to content creators, and if Pearson set up the smart contract to split royalties across the dozens of editors and designers that had a hand in making the book it would be a fantastic use of the blockchain. But this article suggests that Pearson as the distributor will be reaping the most rewards, not the authors of the textbooks.

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