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Comment by dingnuts | Hacker News Reader

an NFT is a record of ownership. if you have no enforcement mechanism it's meaningless, but nobody makes jokes about fungible data files when we're talking about copyright. if you tied an NFT hash to a legal contract then you could actually enforce ownership of those fungible jpegs and the right click copy people would be just as in violation of the law as someone who walks out with your employer's software sources

and jpegs don't actually have anything to do with NFTs other than being used as representations of them by grifters, ruining a useful technology by poisoning the representation of it in minds like yours because a distributed record of software ownership would threaten the app store monopolies.

ok that's conspiratorial but it would explain it..

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> if you tied an NFT hash to a legal contract then you could actually enforce ownership of those fungible jpegs and the right click copy people would be just as in violation of the law as someone who walks out with your employer's software sources

For NFTs "owned" by people in the US, I sure hope you have each and every NTF as a formally registered copyright. IANAL, but it would seem the contract cannot directly affect non-parties, and thus standard copyright law would apply. Registration is required to file a copyright infringement suit.

> and the right click copy people would be just as in violation of the law

What are you EVEN talking about.

If you transmit an image to my computer when I browse your website, that image is now saved on my computer in my browser's cache. It is too late for your supposed legal contact at this point, I have already copied your image, at your explicit instruction. Now try to run that through court.

"Your honor, I instructed the defendant's machine to save a copy of my image on his computer, which it did, causing the defendant to have copied my image, thus violating this here legal contract written on a slice of American cheese."

You can already make legal contracts about the use and re-use of art. NFTS, as a method for trying to prevent people from performing actions the internet explicitly requires for them to even be seen in the first place, were, are, and will remain nonsense.

He's talking about provenance. The NFT just proves who the actual owner is, so when people were right-click downloading and saying "I own this now" you can very easily prove that they don't actually own it, the holder of the NFT does.

> The NFT just proves who the actual owner is

no it does not, as anyone may create a new NFT attached to the same content with different claims

If NFTs only become useful when tied to a regular legal contract, why not just use a regular legal contract?

Because despite some popular opinions to the contrary, the blockchain/crypto part isn't replacing the legal layer; it's just implementing a way of tracking things that's less reliant on trust than the usual way of doing it.

Apparently it's not uncommon that when a debt collector buys a spreadsheet of unpaid debt, they can't actually prove in court that the debtor actually owes them the debt. You'd think some form of cryptocurrency technology would improve this - the legal contract would say you'd pay to a certain smart contract address until the smart contract says you paid enough (the legal contract would also have to specify how this is calculated as it would take precedence over the smart contract in case of a dispute); the smart contract would implement an NFT where the holder of the NFT receives the debt payments. Alternatively, it implements an NFT and holds a payee address (physical address, business name) and whoever has the NFT can update the payee address and whoever that's set to is the current creditor.

Of course, we probably don't want the dystopic parts of society to get more reliable, but the fact is the tech would probably make them so.

> Of course, we probably don't want the dystopic parts of society to get more reliable, but the fact is the tech would probably make them so.

I strongly agree, and thank you for spelling it out. It's a point often lost in discussions of both tech and economics, that we need some slack in the system. That's where happiness, love, friendship, compassion, charity, forgiveness, imagination, and all other things good, nice and human, live. Too much efficiency just grinds people to dust.

(That, and creates brittle systems that breaks the first moment reality asserts itself.)

> Apparently it's not uncommon that when a debt collector buys a spreadsheet of unpaid debt, they can't actually prove in court that the debtor actually owes them the debt. You'd think some form of cryptocurrency technology would improve this

At a glance, I think your idea would work. I'm just curious about corner cases alone, and how often they'd happen.

For example, in some cases, I imagine it would actually reveal there is no proof because the debt is bogus. My impression is, no one in the chain is really incentivized to verify whether the debt is legitimate. Creditors outsource that in bulk to collection agencies, agencies might find it easier to try and collect anyway than proactively validate every entry in the spreadsheet, and plenty of debtors will contest real debts anyway. For the first two, the name of the game is minimizing costs; not sure if adding crypto to the mix would help, or just make the process more complicated and expensive.

I also wonder what would happen if, for some reason, a smart contract/NFT was established around a bogus entry. How much harder would it be for the debtor to prove that they don't actually owe the money in question?

The debt collector would run through the list of proofs when buying the debt without the proof. Automatically. The spreadsheet would, as well as name and address or whatever it already has, list a smart contract ID and a signature proving ownership of the private key currently registered to it. Transfer of debt could even be an atomic blockchain transaction, moving the debt and the money in the same transaction.

Some would probably buy proofless unpaid debt, but it would be almost worthless.

> How much harder would it be for the debtor to prove that they don't actually owe the money in question?

I refer you to the aforementioned dystopia. Even today, if your credit card is used in a transaction involving the physical card and your PIN, it's presumed you agreed to pay.

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