5 ms·

I am calling it now: that blockchain royalty system on NFTs? It is only a matter of time before Hollywood makes NFTs interact with DRM. Your movie purchase will

I am calling it now: that blockchain royalty system on NFTs? It is only a matter of time before Hollywood makes NFTs interact with DRM. Your movie purchase will be an NFT with hardware-backed chain verification.

HPsquared 5y ago
If the NFTs could be bought and sold, this would finally allow a decentralized secondary market for DRM media.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  I... don't like where those ideas are going. At this point I long for pre-Internet days, where physical media (tapes, CDs, books) achieved the same goal while wasting much less resources than it takes to keep the blockchain that would support the NFTs. I also think that anything that further solidifies IP enforcement is going to kill the future. Consider that one of these days, we might progress enough to be able to build something approaching a replicator from Star Trek. The utopian society of the show is built on "too cheap to meter" energy that allows replicators to meet everyone's basic needs (and even fancy whims) for free. But even if we reach a similar level of scientific and technological advancement, we won't be able to realize the utopia part if designs for every replicable goods are owned by a small group of people/companies extracting rent, with technology and law preventing circumvention.
  - adnzzzzZ 5y ago
    Artists directly making money from their art without intermediaries taking huge cuts (and with resales giving them a percentage on top of it) is absolutely not going to kill the future, it's just going to incentivize better creation of art. Scarcity makes economic sense for various kinds of art and there are many fields that have been destroyed by the Internet (i.e. music). It's only natural for the solution to also come from it in this manner.
    - barneygale 5y ago
      Music is flourishing - it's the music industry that has been destroyed by the Internet.
      - adnzzzzZ 5y ago
        Compared to my industry (indie gaming), indie music is in an objectively way worse state.
  - barneygale 5y ago
    Digital art isn't scarce by its very nature - NFTs are an attempt to re-introduce scarcity, and it's fucking depressing. My childhood dream of improving the world by inventing things is a pipe dream; every bit of progress gets mopped up by the people who need it least.
- UncleMeat 5y ago
  But DRM media still requires the server to verify the product. So only part of the ecosystem is decentralized.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
Ekaros 5y ago
That would make way too much sense... I predict online streaming on poor services that will shut down in few years with no option for backup. With both monthly subscription and individual purchases, and user losing purchases if ending subscription...
lucasverra 5y ago
That is pretty smart. How is this not already implemented for film distribution and avoid leakages and pirating? Honest question, i've been on all forms of streaming since 2000, back to torrenting lately to avoid cartelization
- Causality1 5y ago
  It wouldn't be effective. If a human can watch it a computer can copy it. They'll take it right off the output pins of the display driver chip if they have to.
dcolkitt 5y ago
It would also allow the recreation of something like the original Netflix DVD service but purely digital. No more having to manage a half dozen plus streaming subscriptions. One company could go out and start building a comprehensive library of NFTs for every film and series. When you want to watch something you check out the NFT from the library. When you’re done you return it. For very hot items, there may be a waiting list, but you’ll get it eventually. No more being stuck in a content ghetto like with modern streaming services.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
Dwolb 5y ago
Mila Kunis has an NFT project where only token holders can view the associated episodes of a cartoon and upon NFT resale, a percent of the proceeds gets remitted back to the project creators [1]. [1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/k78kay/mila-kunis-stoner-cats-cartoon-is-making-millions-selling-nfts https://www.vice.com/en/article/k78kay/mila-kunis-stoner-cat...
- MereInterest 5y ago
  > upon NFT resale, a percent of the proceeds gets remitted back to the project creators I'd rather have more ways to restore the First Sale Doctrine for digital goods, rather than debasing it further.
  - Dwolb 5y ago
    I don’t disagree and there’s two things I find interesting: 1) Remittance is easily implemented in a smart contract. 2) This aligns long term interests between the project creator and the NFT holder (and one can imagine different incentive structures can be implemented for different projects).
    - MereInterest 5y ago
      I'd agree that it is "interesting", but as additional reasons to be opposed to cryptocurrencies. 1) Remittances for resale imply that ownership was not fully transferred. The item isn't mine, but is some weird mix of being mine, but still having some link back to the person who made it. This is already a problem with digital goods, where I cannot lend an ebook to a friend in the same way that I would lend a physical book. 2) The long-term interests are already aligned due to the existence of a second-hand market, and do not need additional technological protections. Somebody who buys cars new and sells them after 5 years still cares about the maintenance costs of a 15-year-old car, because those impact the sale price at 5 years. 2a) The siphoning of money from a re-sale discourages a second-hand market. If the original maker of an object absconds with 20% of the re-sale price, that gives me less of an incentive to sell it, rather than just throwing it away. This is both from an economic standpoint, because there's a decreased profit motive, and from an emotional standpoint, because somebody is laying claim to my efforts in securing a resale without having a valid reason to do so.
bouncycastle 5y ago
Why use a Blockchain? MySQL will work just fine.
- mpfundstein 5y ago
  and who controls the database?
  - RupertWiser 5y ago
    Who controls the unencrypted video?
  - brazzy 5y ago
    And who the fuck cares except for some crypto nerds?
  - lottin 5y ago
    It doesn't matter, as long as it's a legal entity and can therefore be sued for breach of contract.
  - bouncycastle 5y ago
    You're asking the wrong question... NFTs won't work with DRM, because with DRM you need to encrypt the content and then decrypt it to view it. But you cannot put the decryption key in the NFT, because everything on the blockchain is public. If you put the decryption key with the NFT, everyone will have it. So you will still need some kind of centralized system where you will issue the decryption keys to your viewers, and probably the easiest way to track subscriptions and keys is to use a database like MySQL. (Btw, I do not like DRM at all)
cm2187 5y ago
That will stop people from using bitorrent
RupertWiser 5y ago
What’s the purpose? You still need a centralised store for your unencrypted video. Why would this be preferable to having a database?
jeroenhd 5y ago
They could, but why would they? Right now, they can lock content behind a subscription, remove listed content, edit and re-release content, and pretty much do whatever they want. You don't buy a movie, you buy the limited right to watch what goes as the current iteration of a video file for a certain amount of time. You can't resell your purchase, so everyone has to pay full price to the sellers. Using NFTs or other cryptographic DRM would be hugely beneficial to consumers, but what's the point of helping the consumers? It'll only cut into costs because NFTs require some kind of cryptocoin network to do a bunch of calculations, which is expensive to run and wastes enormous amounts of electricity. A simple RSA signature could be used to license a file to your computer and some DRM comes pretty close to that. If the industry wanted to give you ownership, they already could've done it before the NFT speculators set up the current hype.

HPsquared 5y ago

If the NFTs could be bought and sold, this would finally allow a decentralized secondary market for DRM media.

TeMPOraL 5y ago
I... don't like where those ideas are going. At this point I long for pre-Internet days, where physical media (tapes, CDs, books) achieved the same goal while wasting much less resources than it takes to keep the blockchain that would support the NFTs. I also think that anything that further solidifies IP enforcement is going to kill the future. Consider that one of these days, we might progress enough to be able to build something approaching a replicator from Star Trek. The utopian society of the show is built on "too cheap to meter" energy that allows replicators to meet everyone's basic needs (and even fancy whims) for free. But even if we reach a similar level of scientific and technological advancement, we won't be able to realize the utopia part if designs for every replicable goods are owned by a small group of people/companies extracting rent, with technology and law preventing circumvention.
- adnzzzzZ 5y ago
  Artists directly making money from their art without intermediaries taking huge cuts (and with resales giving them a percentage on top of it) is absolutely not going to kill the future, it's just going to incentivize better creation of art. Scarcity makes economic sense for various kinds of art and there are many fields that have been destroyed by the Internet (i.e. music). It's only natural for the solution to also come from it in this manner.
  - barneygale 5y ago
    Music is flourishing - it's the music industry that has been destroyed by the Internet.
    - adnzzzzZ 5y ago
      Compared to my industry (indie gaming), indie music is in an objectively way worse state.
- barneygale 5y ago
  Digital art isn't scarce by its very nature - NFTs are an attempt to re-introduce scarcity, and it's fucking depressing. My childhood dream of improving the world by inventing things is a pipe dream; every bit of progress gets mopped up by the people who need it least.
UncleMeat 5y ago
But DRM media still requires the server to verify the product. So only part of the ecosystem is decentralized.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

Ekaros 5y ago

That would make way too much sense... I predict online streaming on poor services that will shut down in few years with no option for backup. With both monthly subscription and individual purchases, and user losing purchases if ending subscription...

lucasverra 5y ago

That is pretty smart. How is this not already implemented for film distribution and avoid leakages and pirating? Honest question, i've been on all forms of streaming since 2000, back to torrenting lately to avoid cartelization

Causality1 5y ago
It wouldn't be effective. If a human can watch it a computer can copy it. They'll take it right off the output pins of the display driver chip if they have to.

dcolkitt 5y ago

It would also allow the recreation of something like the original Netflix DVD service but purely digital. No more having to manage a half dozen plus streaming subscriptions. One company could go out and start building a comprehensive library of NFTs for every film and series. When you want to watch something you check out the NFT from the library. When you’re done you return it. For very hot items, there may be a waiting list, but you’ll get it eventually. No more being stuck in a content ghetto like with modern streaming services.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

Dwolb 5y ago

Mila Kunis has an NFT project where only token holders can view the associated episodes of a cartoon and upon NFT resale, a percent of the proceeds gets remitted back to the project creators [1]. [1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/k78kay/mila-kunis-stoner-cats-cartoon-is-making-millions-selling-nfts https://www.vice.com/en/article/k78kay/mila-kunis-stoner-cat...

MereInterest 5y ago
> upon NFT resale, a percent of the proceeds gets remitted back to the project creators I'd rather have more ways to restore the First Sale Doctrine for digital goods, rather than debasing it further.
- Dwolb 5y ago
  I don’t disagree and there’s two things I find interesting: 1) Remittance is easily implemented in a smart contract. 2) This aligns long term interests between the project creator and the NFT holder (and one can imagine different incentive structures can be implemented for different projects).
  - MereInterest 5y ago
    I'd agree that it is "interesting", but as additional reasons to be opposed to cryptocurrencies. 1) Remittances for resale imply that ownership was not fully transferred. The item isn't mine, but is some weird mix of being mine, but still having some link back to the person who made it. This is already a problem with digital goods, where I cannot lend an ebook to a friend in the same way that I would lend a physical book. 2) The long-term interests are already aligned due to the existence of a second-hand market, and do not need additional technological protections. Somebody who buys cars new and sells them after 5 years still cares about the maintenance costs of a 15-year-old car, because those impact the sale price at 5 years. 2a) The siphoning of money from a re-sale discourages a second-hand market. If the original maker of an object absconds with 20% of the re-sale price, that gives me less of an incentive to sell it, rather than just throwing it away. This is both from an economic standpoint, because there's a decreased profit motive, and from an emotional standpoint, because somebody is laying claim to my efforts in securing a resale without having a valid reason to do so.

bouncycastle 5y ago

Why use a Blockchain? MySQL will work just fine.

mpfundstein 5y ago
and who controls the database?
- RupertWiser 5y ago
  Who controls the unencrypted video?
- brazzy 5y ago
  And who the fuck cares except for some crypto nerds?
- lottin 5y ago
  It doesn't matter, as long as it's a legal entity and can therefore be sued for breach of contract.
- bouncycastle 5y ago
  You're asking the wrong question... NFTs won't work with DRM, because with DRM you need to encrypt the content and then decrypt it to view it. But you cannot put the decryption key in the NFT, because everything on the blockchain is public. If you put the decryption key with the NFT, everyone will have it. So you will still need some kind of centralized system where you will issue the decryption keys to your viewers, and probably the easiest way to track subscriptions and keys is to use a database like MySQL. (Btw, I do not like DRM at all)

cm2187 5y ago

That will stop people from using bitorrent

RupertWiser 5y ago

What’s the purpose? You still need a centralised store for your unencrypted video. Why would this be preferable to having a database?

jeroenhd 5y ago

They could, but why would they? Right now, they can lock content behind a subscription, remove listed content, edit and re-release content, and pretty much do whatever they want. You don't buy a movie, you buy the limited right to watch what goes as the current iteration of a video file for a certain amount of time. You can't resell your purchase, so everyone has to pay full price to the sellers. Using NFTs or other cryptographic DRM would be hugely beneficial to consumers, but what's the point of helping the consumers? It'll only cut into costs because NFTs require some kind of cryptocoin network to do a bunch of calculations, which is expensive to run and wastes enormous amounts of electricity. A simple RSA signature could be used to license a file to your computer and some DRM comes pretty close to that. If the industry wanted to give you ownership, they already could've done it before the NFT speculators set up the current hype.