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It's actually not a sale of copyright - that remains with the family. It's purely the sale of the NFT. You can see the terms of the sale here: https://www.charl

It's actually not a sale of copyright - that remains with the family. It's purely the sale of the NFT. You can see the terms of the sale here: https://www.charliebitme.com/#/auction-terms https://www.charliebitme.com/#/auction-terms

Joeboy 5y ago
When you say "the NFT" - there isn't actually any legal or technical reason the family can't sell more NFTs of the video, is there? Or anybody else for that matter, unless they count as derived works I guess.
- mattigames 5y ago
  This NFT in particular is the first one for that video and the one going famous on social media therefore it's the "valuable" one, I wish I was joking.
- danielvf 5y ago
  If you made a hundred atom-exact replicas of the Mona Lisa, it wouldn't dent the value of the "real" Mona Lisa very much, if at all, outside of the difficulty in telling them apart - and the nature of NFT's mean that it's absolutely clear which one is the "real" one. Technically, of course someone could clone it. No value there though, since the clones would lack scarcity, and wouldn't be "authentic". Legally, no one else can clone this particular NFT, since that would be directly copying someone else's copyrighted work. The family, the owners of the copyright could, but the odds of clones selling for anything would be minimal.
  - Joeboy 5y ago
    But if you sold a hundred notes saying "the bearer of this paper owns the Mona Lisa", they're going to lose value pretty quickly once people catch on. That seems more like the right metaphor to me. I don't know about cloning an NFT, but creating an NFT is just putting a link, or hash etc, on a blockchain, isn't it? Or thereabouts. Anybody can do that, without owning the copyright. I think it's pretty well established that a link is not copyright infringement. I'm not sure about a hash, but I very much doubt it.
    - miracle2k 5y ago
      If Damien Hirst sold 1000 more sharks they would also lose value quickly, right?
      - Joeboy 5y ago
        I guess so? Not sure where you're going with that.
        miracle2k 5y ago
        I suppose I am asking why people are concerned about this with NFTs then.
        Joeboy 5y ago
        Because, as I understand it, the idea of an NFT is to demonstrate some sort of "ownership" of a work of art. The issue I have is that they don't do that. An ownership document that can legally be duplicated and distributed ad-infinitum by anybody at zero cost is not an effective ownership document. Even for the novel and legally meaningless version of "ownership" conferred by NFTs. If Damien Hirst sells 1000 sharks, the buyers get the physical sharks themselves, I guess along with some falsifiable and legally meaningful documentation. They really do own the sharks, physically and legally.
        miracle2k 5y ago
        But you can't duplicate the ownership document that is the NFT, at least not anymore than I can duplicate the ownership documentation of a physical piece. The situation is even legally the same - it would be fraud if I pretended it's the original, but legal otherwise. The difference is in the copyability of the work itself.
        Joeboy 5y ago
        There's nothing technical stopping you creating further NFTs for the same work, and there's nothing legal stopping you selling them, unless you enter into a separate legal agreement that makes the NFT irrelevant. It occurs to me that selling an NFT is like entering an artwork into a copyright registry, then selling the paperwork (without the actual copyright). To be fair I can imagine the original copyright registration docs for eg. Gone With the Wind being worth something to collectors.
  - gizmo686 5y ago
    To the extent that the courts recognize that possession of the NFT key represents sole ownership of or license to the copyright. Assuming for the sake of argument the simplest case: * It is not in dispute that Alice created a digital work * It is not in dispute that Alice owned the full copyright at the time of creation * It is not in dispute that Alice only sold/licensed the copyright once * It is not in dispute that said one time happened in the same transaction that the corresponding NFT was transferred, nor that Alice and the recipient intended for the NFT to represent ownership. * The NFT is transferd on-chain several additional times. Most of these assumptions can easily become the central area of a copyright dispute. However, even assuming these assumptions are accurate, there are more problems: * Suppose that at some point in time Bob owned the NFT. Charlie claims that Bob either licenced the work to him, or sold him all rights, however the NFT was not transfered. Since Bob owned the copyright, doing so was within his rights. The NFT subsequently gets transferred multiple times, which has no effect on what rights Charlie has. The current owner of the NFT sues Charlie for copyright infringement for using the NFT. * Suppose that at some point in time Bob owned the NFT. It is subsequently transferred several more times. Bob claims that he never sold it, and said transfers are the result of a hack. To work around these issues, you cannot sell the copyright to the NFT owner, but must license it under fairly restrictive terms, such as: * All rights under this license are provided exclusivly to any entity that demonstrates current ownership of the NFT, and are revoke when such an entity loses the ability to do so. * Any rights holder under this license may not grant rights to others [0] * The original copyright holder revokes all further rights from themselves. Additionally, you need this license to track the work (not difficult, many digital works ship with a license nowadays). Further, you need the courts to recognize the terms of the license as valid and interpret them the way you intended. [0] Any desired ability to grant rights could still be encoded into the NFT system, in which case the license should clarify that
  - hiq 5y ago
    > the odds of clones selling for anything would be minimal. Why do you think so? If you call it ${NFT_NAME}_2, don't you think people who couldn't get ${NFT_NAME} would be at least slightly interested?
codingdave 5y ago
That is what makes this so absurd to me. You are buying... nothing. A right to say you "own" something while the family still clearly owns it. You cannot do anything with it, they can do everything. It is like the companies that sell you stars or acres on the moon. I just don't see any sense to this.
- BenoitEssiambre 5y ago
  It's a digital autograph. I'm not sure why it would be worth that much though.

Joeboy 5y ago

When you say "the NFT" - there isn't actually any legal or technical reason the family can't sell more NFTs of the video, is there? Or anybody else for that matter, unless they count as derived works I guess.

mattigames 5y ago
This NFT in particular is the first one for that video and the one going famous on social media therefore it's the "valuable" one, I wish I was joking.
danielvf 5y ago
If you made a hundred atom-exact replicas of the Mona Lisa, it wouldn't dent the value of the "real" Mona Lisa very much, if at all, outside of the difficulty in telling them apart - and the nature of NFT's mean that it's absolutely clear which one is the "real" one. Technically, of course someone could clone it. No value there though, since the clones would lack scarcity, and wouldn't be "authentic". Legally, no one else can clone this particular NFT, since that would be directly copying someone else's copyrighted work. The family, the owners of the copyright could, but the odds of clones selling for anything would be minimal.
- Joeboy 5y ago
  But if you sold a hundred notes saying "the bearer of this paper owns the Mona Lisa", they're going to lose value pretty quickly once people catch on. That seems more like the right metaphor to me. I don't know about cloning an NFT, but creating an NFT is just putting a link, or hash etc, on a blockchain, isn't it? Or thereabouts. Anybody can do that, without owning the copyright. I think it's pretty well established that a link is not copyright infringement. I'm not sure about a hash, but I very much doubt it.
  - miracle2k 5y ago
    If Damien Hirst sold 1000 more sharks they would also lose value quickly, right?
    - Joeboy 5y ago
      I guess so? Not sure where you're going with that.
      - miracle2k 5y ago
        I suppose I am asking why people are concerned about this with NFTs then.
        Joeboy 5y ago
        Because, as I understand it, the idea of an NFT is to demonstrate some sort of "ownership" of a work of art. The issue I have is that they don't do that. An ownership document that can legally be duplicated and distributed ad-infinitum by anybody at zero cost is not an effective ownership document. Even for the novel and legally meaningless version of "ownership" conferred by NFTs. If Damien Hirst sells 1000 sharks, the buyers get the physical sharks themselves, I guess along with some falsifiable and legally meaningful documentation. They really do own the sharks, physically and legally.
        miracle2k 5y ago
        But you can't duplicate the ownership document that is the NFT, at least not anymore than I can duplicate the ownership documentation of a physical piece. The situation is even legally the same - it would be fraud if I pretended it's the original, but legal otherwise. The difference is in the copyability of the work itself.
        Joeboy 5y ago
        There's nothing technical stopping you creating further NFTs for the same work, and there's nothing legal stopping you selling them, unless you enter into a separate legal agreement that makes the NFT irrelevant. It occurs to me that selling an NFT is like entering an artwork into a copyright registry, then selling the paperwork (without the actual copyright). To be fair I can imagine the original copyright registration docs for eg. Gone With the Wind being worth something to collectors.
- gizmo686 5y ago
  To the extent that the courts recognize that possession of the NFT key represents sole ownership of or license to the copyright. Assuming for the sake of argument the simplest case: * It is not in dispute that Alice created a digital work * It is not in dispute that Alice owned the full copyright at the time of creation * It is not in dispute that Alice only sold/licensed the copyright once * It is not in dispute that said one time happened in the same transaction that the corresponding NFT was transferred, nor that Alice and the recipient intended for the NFT to represent ownership. * The NFT is transferd on-chain several additional times. Most of these assumptions can easily become the central area of a copyright dispute. However, even assuming these assumptions are accurate, there are more problems: * Suppose that at some point in time Bob owned the NFT. Charlie claims that Bob either licenced the work to him, or sold him all rights, however the NFT was not transfered. Since Bob owned the copyright, doing so was within his rights. The NFT subsequently gets transferred multiple times, which has no effect on what rights Charlie has. The current owner of the NFT sues Charlie for copyright infringement for using the NFT. * Suppose that at some point in time Bob owned the NFT. It is subsequently transferred several more times. Bob claims that he never sold it, and said transfers are the result of a hack. To work around these issues, you cannot sell the copyright to the NFT owner, but must license it under fairly restrictive terms, such as: * All rights under this license are provided exclusivly to any entity that demonstrates current ownership of the NFT, and are revoke when such an entity loses the ability to do so. * Any rights holder under this license may not grant rights to others [0] * The original copyright holder revokes all further rights from themselves. Additionally, you need this license to track the work (not difficult, many digital works ship with a license nowadays). Further, you need the courts to recognize the terms of the license as valid and interpret them the way you intended. [0] Any desired ability to grant rights could still be encoded into the NFT system, in which case the license should clarify that
- hiq 5y ago
  > the odds of clones selling for anything would be minimal. Why do you think so? If you call it ${NFT_NAME}_2, don't you think people who couldn't get ${NFT_NAME} would be at least slightly interested?

codingdave 5y ago

That is what makes this so absurd to me. You are buying... nothing. A right to say you "own" something while the family still clearly owns it. You cannot do anything with it, they can do everything. It is like the companies that sell you stars or acres on the moon. I just don't see any sense to this.

BenoitEssiambre 5y ago
It's a digital autograph. I'm not sure why it would be worth that much though.