4 ms·

To the best of my understanding, there is a lot of confusion around what is being sold when an NFT like the Beeple JPG NFT changes hands. What people think was

by runako 6y ago

To the best of my understanding, there is a lot of confusion around what is being sold when an NFT like the Beeple JPG NFT changes hands. What people think was sold is the JPG. What was actually sold is the right to say you purchased an NFT that represents the JPG. In the case of the NFT sale, ownership of the JPG was not a part of the transaction. Clarification may be required, and an example will help. If you see a JPG of The Mandalorian on the Web, you can be sure that Disney, Inc. owns that image. Which means that Disney, Inc. can stop others from using it; can charge license fees for including it in other works; can sell the rights to do so to others as it pleases. You cannot download an official Disney Mandalorian image, change a few pixels, and resell it. Disney owns the work. If Disney sells it, the buyer can then charge license fees, etc. By contrast, the entity that purchased the NFT for the Beeple JPG does not have any rights whatsoever over the JPG or its intellectual property. That entity owns the right to say they are the sole owner of a slot on a blockchain known to be the entity that purchased a given slot on a blockchain (there may be many equivalent slots on that blockchain). They can sell the right to ownership to that slot on the blockchain, but they do not have any claim on future use of the Beeple JPG. If the buyer makes derivative works ("change a pixel or two") for resale, Beeple could sue for damages. In any common understanding of "ownership," the NFT buyer does not own the Beeple JPG. Going back to the Mandalorian example, Disney could sell an infinite quantity of NFTs around all the images and video clips they currently publish for free on the Internet. (The NBA is currently doing likewise.) Like the Beeple NFT, those wouldn't convey ownership in any real sense, but could pad Disney's margins in a very real fashion.

ffggvv 6y ago
and who would have enough money to buy something like that and get be dumb enough to think it has value? mark cuban? i can only think of a few midwits rich enough
- jamesgreenleaf 6y ago
  The person who bought it (pseudonym Metakovan) runs https://metapurse.fund/ https://metapurse.fund/ and says that Beeple's NFT is worth a billion. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jessedamiani/2021/03/12/beeples-the-first-5000-days-sold-to-metakovan-founder-of-metapurse-for-69346250 https://www.forbes.com/sites/jessedamiani/2021/03/12/beeples...
  - tablespoon 6y ago
    > The person who bought it (pseudonym Metakovan) runs https://metapurse.fund/ https://metapurse.fund/ and says that Beeple's NFT is worth a billion. I am not at all surprised that the person who paid that much is involved in hyping NFTs. IIRC, they also paid for it with Ethereum, and I think it's highly likely that they were someone who hit the crypto jackpot by getting it when it was very, very cheap, and are hoping lightning strikes twice.
  - anothernewdude 6y ago
    You mean a person who sunk a lot of money into it and has a vested interest in having other people think it has a lot of value thinks it has a lot of value? Holy shit.
- jobigoud 6y ago
  > be dumb enough to think it has value? It's only dumb until they can find someone even dumber to buy it for even more. Then it's genius.
  - nicbou 6y ago
    It's akin to betting on the supply of fools, and I constantly underestimate its size.
chrisco255 6y ago
> By contrast, the entity that purchased the NFT for the Beeple JPG does not have any rights whatsoever over the JPG or its intellectual property. This varies by NFT. Like software, different NFTs have different license agreements. Some grant exclusive copyright ownership to the holder of the NFT. The industry as a whole lacks standardization in this respect. But the main NFT marketplaces are working on this.
- runako 6y ago
  > for the Beeple JPG is not an industry problem. Another big player is NBA Top Shot, which also is not selling IP rights. In theory, something like an NFT could be useful. But this isn't about standards at this point. The NBA isn't retaining IP because there's no standards, they're doing it because they're not going to give away their valuable IP when suckers will pay to say they paid for a receipt.
- Anon1096 6y ago
  Selling the copyright on an image is completely orthogonal to the NFT it is being accompanied with, however. The NFT is only acting as a certificate of ownership saying that someone verifiably possesses the NFT. In my opinion, the NFT bring sold alongside the copyright adds very little value that couldn't already be done pre-blockchains. Courts were perfectly capable of evaluating ownership claims in the past. And many of these NFTs don't even pretend to sell ownership of any underlying asset. Take Jack Dorsey's tweet, or the burned Banksy artwork for example. When you buy those, you get ownership of exactly 0 actual assets. It's just cashing in on NFTmania (and the larger cryptomania).
  - chrisco255 6y ago
    Not at all. You can hash a document that contains the rights to IPFS and embed that file hash on the NFT itself. I can imagine in the future we will see license agreements similar to how open source software has MIT, Apache, GNU, etc delineated by a LICENSE.md file in the root directory of the repo. It removes all ambiguity. It's even defensible in court. The burned Banksy also had a digital representation attached to the NFT. The Jack Dorsey tweet was sold by the man himself. He verified it on his own social network. In that sense the Jack Dorsey NFT is as good as an autographed Babe Ruth baseball.
anothernewdude 6y ago
I purchased all NFTs ever. Huh. Guess it doesn't sell you that right. Merely the right to prove it. How often are people proving they own the NFTs? Never?
- jobigoud 6y ago
  For art, never, it doesn't make sense. For other use case like owning a piece of virtual land, the game server could perform that verification to configure which game-world privileges the user has. Multiple independent applications can be built on top of the same virtual land layer, enforcing the underlying ownership contracts, this can't be done with traditional virtual environments. Same for membership NFT, you could "prove" to one organization that you are a member of another organization.
  - psychiatrist24 6y ago
    Couldn't you for art have a separate right for being allowed to hang the actual piece in your living room, and for selling prints? Then somebody could own it for their living room, somebody else could make money selling prints. In that case a NFT could work just fine.

by runako 6y ago

ffggvv 6y ago

and who would have enough money to buy something like that and get be dumb enough to think it has value? mark cuban? i can only think of a few midwits rich enough

jamesgreenleaf 6y ago
The person who bought it (pseudonym Metakovan) runs https://metapurse.fund/ https://metapurse.fund/ and says that Beeple's NFT is worth a billion. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jessedamiani/2021/03/12/beeples-the-first-5000-days-sold-to-metakovan-founder-of-metapurse-for-69346250 https://www.forbes.com/sites/jessedamiani/2021/03/12/beeples...
- tablespoon 6y ago
  > The person who bought it (pseudonym Metakovan) runs https://metapurse.fund/ https://metapurse.fund/ and says that Beeple's NFT is worth a billion. I am not at all surprised that the person who paid that much is involved in hyping NFTs. IIRC, they also paid for it with Ethereum, and I think it's highly likely that they were someone who hit the crypto jackpot by getting it when it was very, very cheap, and are hoping lightning strikes twice.
- anothernewdude 6y ago
  You mean a person who sunk a lot of money into it and has a vested interest in having other people think it has a lot of value thinks it has a lot of value? Holy shit.
jobigoud 6y ago
> be dumb enough to think it has value? It's only dumb until they can find someone even dumber to buy it for even more. Then it's genius.
- nicbou 6y ago
  It's akin to betting on the supply of fools, and I constantly underestimate its size.

chrisco255 6y ago

> By contrast, the entity that purchased the NFT for the Beeple JPG does not have any rights whatsoever over the JPG or its intellectual property. This varies by NFT. Like software, different NFTs have different license agreements. Some grant exclusive copyright ownership to the holder of the NFT. The industry as a whole lacks standardization in this respect. But the main NFT marketplaces are working on this.

runako 6y ago
> for the Beeple JPG is not an industry problem. Another big player is NBA Top Shot, which also is not selling IP rights. In theory, something like an NFT could be useful. But this isn't about standards at this point. The NBA isn't retaining IP because there's no standards, they're doing it because they're not going to give away their valuable IP when suckers will pay to say they paid for a receipt.
Anon1096 6y ago
Selling the copyright on an image is completely orthogonal to the NFT it is being accompanied with, however. The NFT is only acting as a certificate of ownership saying that someone verifiably possesses the NFT. In my opinion, the NFT bring sold alongside the copyright adds very little value that couldn't already be done pre-blockchains. Courts were perfectly capable of evaluating ownership claims in the past. And many of these NFTs don't even pretend to sell ownership of any underlying asset. Take Jack Dorsey's tweet, or the burned Banksy artwork for example. When you buy those, you get ownership of exactly 0 actual assets. It's just cashing in on NFTmania (and the larger cryptomania).
- chrisco255 6y ago
  Not at all. You can hash a document that contains the rights to IPFS and embed that file hash on the NFT itself. I can imagine in the future we will see license agreements similar to how open source software has MIT, Apache, GNU, etc delineated by a LICENSE.md file in the root directory of the repo. It removes all ambiguity. It's even defensible in court. The burned Banksy also had a digital representation attached to the NFT. The Jack Dorsey tweet was sold by the man himself. He verified it on his own social network. In that sense the Jack Dorsey NFT is as good as an autographed Babe Ruth baseball.

anothernewdude 6y ago

I purchased all NFTs ever. Huh. Guess it doesn't sell you that right. Merely the right to prove it. How often are people proving they own the NFTs? Never?

jobigoud 6y ago
For art, never, it doesn't make sense. For other use case like owning a piece of virtual land, the game server could perform that verification to configure which game-world privileges the user has. Multiple independent applications can be built on top of the same virtual land layer, enforcing the underlying ownership contracts, this can't be done with traditional virtual environments. Same for membership NFT, you could "prove" to one organization that you are a member of another organization.
- psychiatrist24 6y ago
  Couldn't you for art have a separate right for being allowed to hang the actual piece in your living room, and for selling prints? Then somebody could own it for their living room, somebody else could make money selling prints. In that case a NFT could work just fine.