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The author doesn't address the biggest issue: ensuring scarcity of digital artifacts. How does a digital artist create limited editions of their digital artwork

The author doesn't address the biggest issue: ensuring scarcity of digital artifacts. How does a digital artist create limited editions of their digital artwork?

temp10298385 5y ago
Lack of scarcity is the unique selling point of the digital. I think future generations will look back at the madness of manufacturing scarcity because society refused to adapt to abundance.
- mushysteven 5y ago
  How does an artist get paid?
  - temp10298385 5y ago
    Good question. I think I can best answer this by example: People get paid to develop Blender. Blender even has an in house film studio, with paid artists. The software and artwork is made available for free. No artificial scarcity is imposed. And no one is starving. Trying to emulate the restrictions of the material realm is the wrong direction.
    - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
      It's a good example but I can't help feeling that we would end up with a much smaller ecosystem if that was how all software was funded. I work in a very narrow niche selling B2B and my experience tells me it just wouldn't be viable if it was open source. I'd end up selling support which is not how I want to work.
    - mushysteven 5y ago
      I don't think comparing the Blender Foundation to an artist is fair. And Blender is a software widely used in the industry.
      - temp10298385 5y ago
        It is an example of how to think outside the constraints of scarcity when dealing with immaterial ”property”. But if you are looking for individual artists there’s Patreon. I’m sure people can think of reasons why Patreon does not fulfill some criteria which to them is important for a healthy artistic community. After all, people are imaginative. What I’m encouraging you to do is to use that imagination to think of ways to embrace digital abundance, instead of trying to shoehorn the property rights that humans constructed to distribute physical goods onto something inherently non-physical. If humanity can not handle the virtually infinite supply of digital goods without artificially enforcing scarcity, what does that say about us?
  - simion314 5y ago
    Not an universal solution, but you can get paid once by a person or a group to paint/draw/program/record what they want. I see people showing of what they can do and then accepting requests on patreon, if the client shares the thing later is something is probable that will happen.
  - Jensson 5y ago
    > How does an artist get paid? If you run a MLM scheme then you aren't an artist, you are a conman. NFT's is a solution to get conmen paid, it isn't a solution to get artists paid.
forgotmyoldname 5y ago
NFTs don't create scarcity either. The image is freely available to anyone. Nobody knows you own an NFT unless you explicitly drop in and mention you own the image every single time it's posted somewhere, in which case people will mock you. But the actual solution has been around for centuries. An artist can sign their work or tailor it directly for the purchaser. Artists have been doing commissions online forever now and you can have them write your name if you want. Anyone out there "stealing" work you bought is either saving something with your name on it, or they're modifying it to remove your name. No artist views NFTs as a solution to an already solved problem. They're either seeing it as a scam and avoiding it, or they're seeing it as a scam that they can quickly cash in on. Countless artists are on twitter and various places online making rock-solid careers out of selling art commissions. NFTs were never a part of it. The people proposing it as a solution are the ones "investing" in NFTs.
- mattdesl 5y ago
  NFT is scarce by definition, hence their "non-fungibility." Unlike traditional physical art, the economic value of an NFT is not driven by scarcity of access to the media that it represents (such as a JPG or GIF), as the token remains provably scarce despite the abundance of its associated digital media file. This is a rather interesting, albeit polarizing, new paradigm.
  - KaiserPro 5y ago
    > This is a rather interesting, albeit polarizing, new paradigm. its not really, its basically the same as fake paper shares from the late 17th century. Sure everyone knows they are fake, but they still have a value because they can talk a good game. "I've just sold 15 shares in the south sea company to Jacob, I have a few left, I can do you a good price." but how do I know they are real? "look they have the seal, and they are numbered. plus shares only give you a tiny part of the company anyway, its totally new and valuable. The prices keep going up, you can sell them to your friends"
    - mattdesl 5y ago
bni 5y ago
Today DRM exists that is quite hard and time consuming to crack (Denuvo). Some games exists that has not been cracked for 1+ year. Has anybody tried to use this to provide scarcity for a digital artifact besides game developers? A picture can always be screenshotted, so instead think more a 3D digital environment, sort of like a FPS but without the guns, instead a painting or sculpture you can walk around in.
- islon 5y ago
  Denuvo is easily cracked for games people care about. It's not put in games to stop crackers, it's put there to allow the game to go through the first weeks (where 90% of the sales happen) without competition from pirated versions. After this time some companies even remove the DRM because it already did it's job. The whole game industry is based on hype in the hope people buy on day 1 or, even better, pre-oder the games. One reason most big games are released broken or in a very buggy state.

The author doesn't address the biggest issue: ensuring scarcity of digital artifacts. How does a digital artist create limited editions of their digital artwork?

temp10298385 5y ago

Lack of scarcity is the unique selling point of the digital. I think future generations will look back at the madness of manufacturing scarcity because society refused to adapt to abundance.

mushysteven 5y ago
How does an artist get paid?
- temp10298385 5y ago
  Good question. I think I can best answer this by example: People get paid to develop Blender. Blender even has an in house film studio, with paid artists. The software and artwork is made available for free. No artificial scarcity is imposed. And no one is starving. Trying to emulate the restrictions of the material realm is the wrong direction.
  - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
    It's a good example but I can't help feeling that we would end up with a much smaller ecosystem if that was how all software was funded. I work in a very narrow niche selling B2B and my experience tells me it just wouldn't be viable if it was open source. I'd end up selling support which is not how I want to work.
  - mushysteven 5y ago
    I don't think comparing the Blender Foundation to an artist is fair. And Blender is a software widely used in the industry.
    - temp10298385 5y ago
      It is an example of how to think outside the constraints of scarcity when dealing with immaterial ”property”. But if you are looking for individual artists there’s Patreon. I’m sure people can think of reasons why Patreon does not fulfill some criteria which to them is important for a healthy artistic community. After all, people are imaginative. What I’m encouraging you to do is to use that imagination to think of ways to embrace digital abundance, instead of trying to shoehorn the property rights that humans constructed to distribute physical goods onto something inherently non-physical. If humanity can not handle the virtually infinite supply of digital goods without artificially enforcing scarcity, what does that say about us?
- simion314 5y ago
  Not an universal solution, but you can get paid once by a person or a group to paint/draw/program/record what they want. I see people showing of what they can do and then accepting requests on patreon, if the client shares the thing later is something is probable that will happen.
- Jensson 5y ago
  > How does an artist get paid? If you run a MLM scheme then you aren't an artist, you are a conman. NFT's is a solution to get conmen paid, it isn't a solution to get artists paid.

forgotmyoldname 5y ago

NFTs don't create scarcity either. The image is freely available to anyone. Nobody knows you own an NFT unless you explicitly drop in and mention you own the image every single time it's posted somewhere, in which case people will mock you. But the actual solution has been around for centuries. An artist can sign their work or tailor it directly for the purchaser. Artists have been doing commissions online forever now and you can have them write your name if you want. Anyone out there "stealing" work you bought is either saving something with your name on it, or they're modifying it to remove your name. No artist views NFTs as a solution to an already solved problem. They're either seeing it as a scam and avoiding it, or they're seeing it as a scam that they can quickly cash in on. Countless artists are on twitter and various places online making rock-solid careers out of selling art commissions. NFTs were never a part of it. The people proposing it as a solution are the ones "investing" in NFTs.

mattdesl 5y ago
NFT is scarce by definition, hence their "non-fungibility." Unlike traditional physical art, the economic value of an NFT is not driven by scarcity of access to the media that it represents (such as a JPG or GIF), as the token remains provably scarce despite the abundance of its associated digital media file. This is a rather interesting, albeit polarizing, new paradigm.
- KaiserPro 5y ago
  > This is a rather interesting, albeit polarizing, new paradigm. its not really, its basically the same as fake paper shares from the late 17th century. Sure everyone knows they are fake, but they still have a value because they can talk a good game. "I've just sold 15 shares in the south sea company to Jacob, I have a few left, I can do you a good price." but how do I know they are real? "look they have the seal, and they are numbered. plus shares only give you a tiny part of the company anyway, its totally new and valuable. The prices keep going up, you can sell them to your friends"
  - mattdesl 5y ago

bni 5y ago

Today DRM exists that is quite hard and time consuming to crack (Denuvo). Some games exists that has not been cracked for 1+ year. Has anybody tried to use this to provide scarcity for a digital artifact besides game developers? A picture can always be screenshotted, so instead think more a 3D digital environment, sort of like a FPS but without the guns, instead a painting or sculpture you can walk around in.

islon 5y ago
Denuvo is easily cracked for games people care about. It's not put in games to stop crackers, it's put there to allow the game to go through the first weeks (where 90% of the sales happen) without competition from pirated versions. After this time some companies even remove the DRM because it already did it's job. The whole game industry is based on hype in the hope people buy on day 1 or, even better, pre-oder the games. One reason most big games are released broken or in a very buggy state.