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One use case I was wondering for NFTs; would it make sense for photographers? So if I took some "amazing" photos of stuff, whether it was art, landscape or 'st

One use case I was wondering for NFTs; would it make sense for photographers? So if I took some "amazing" photos of stuff, whether it was art, landscape or 'stock' style photos. I could list them on a website to be sold, and sell the NFT of the photo. Yes - anyone can "right click -> copy" the photo, but we are talking about the licensing side of the photo. This proves the person using the photo(s) in their product or website etc has the "right" to use that photo, in the same way open source projects have licences that people are expected to follow? The person who bought the photo could on sell those rights at a later stage if they no longer wanted to use my photo (since anyone can sell the NFT). Basically shutterstock.com or something, but with NFTs? Its about the only genuine use case I can think of...

blue1 5y ago
One problem that I have noticed in the NFT space is that the platforms only deal with transaction between wallets, not persons. The association between wallets and persons is tenuous (by design). You don't know if you are buying from the real right holder (e.g. the author), and on the other side it is difficult to prove that the owner of a particular wallet is you.
schrijver 5y ago
How does this improve upon copyright in practical terms? Because finding out who the rights holder is becomes more straightforward? I’m not aware how minting an NFT works exactly, but wouldn’t the person to whom the NFT points still have to prove they’re the rights holder and have engaged in some legal contract for that claim to be valid?
amalcon 5y ago
I think this is kind of the idea, but it has basically the same problems as other areas. You're relying on meatspace legal and copyright systems to associate "ownership" / "right to use" with the NFT, but you could just use that same system to associate those rights with the purchaser directly.
- capableweb 5y ago
  The only tangible different is that once you've establish the meatspace laws, the ownership can be transferred on chain and still hold a valid claim, instead of having to result in meatspace in order to transfer it.
  - schrijver 5y ago
    If you want to transfer ownership (copyright) within the traditional legal framework, you’ll also loose your say in what happens next, so you can’t guarantee that a subsequent change in NFT ownership automatically means a change in ownership of the rights. What you could do is retain the copyright yourself, but accord an open-ended copyright license (like the way oss licenses are written) that accords certain rights to the owner of the NFT (and have the license describe how to determine who is the owner of the NFT).
  - cslarson 5y ago
    This is the value of blockchain in a nutshell. Programmable trust. All manner of tokens (represented things - both digital and not), can be moved, modified, leveraged, etc. It is a public ledger and api for trust. Probably people still under-appreciate the utility, liquidity, and overall productivity boon this will be.
KaiserPro 5y ago
But we already have a mechanism for licensing, its copyright. NFTs provide no new tools or even solutions for tracing, enforcing or indeed arbitrating licensing of a thing. Its just a hash. Photo stock sites already have perceptual hash tracing. However for them its useless as they only ever sell licenses to use the artwork, not "ownership". They still retain the original copyright, which allows them to sell licenses to use the image/sound/thing
- sumeno 5y ago
  > Its just a hash NFTs aren’t even a hash, they are a URL.
  - miracle2k 5y ago
    IPFS urls, widely used, are a hash. Media data is also sometimes stored on chain; sometimes code is stored that generates the artwork.
jeffwass 5y ago
Here’s a general issue I don’t yet understand yet for NFT’s. Suppose you take an amazing photo (or create digital artwork), and pack it up as an NFT on platform A using token/blockchain technology Alpha. Alice buys this token, and has some sort of limited ownership of your picture. I (a nefarious user) take the same digital photo you displayed on your website, and sell it to Bob on platform B with blockchain Beta. I also take your digital photo, make some minor alterations and put it up again on Platform A with Blockchain alpha and sell it to Charlie. Alice, Bob, and Charlie all think they own the picture, and while they do own their own versions, how do we know Alice is the “right” owner of your photo? Especially in the future when you’re not around to confirm the version Alice has is the right one?
- laurencei 5y ago
  Yeah - I wondered about this exact issue too. Same as all the NFT "artwork" I see around. Why cant I just literally copy and paste the artwork, maybe change one single pixel, and re-mint it?
  - jeffwass 5y ago
    But aside from re-minting it with alterations, you can mint the exact same digital artwork on different NFT platforms, so how do we know which platform is “right”?
    - Joker_vD 5y ago
      Well, you don't. Things don't have identities, not really, and so all the superstructures built upon such concepts collapse the moment when demonstrating this dirty philosophical secret becomes practical ― and digital entities are perfect for such demonstrations.
    - deltron3030 5y ago
      > so how do we know which platform is “right”? The right one is the one the original author of the artwork released it on. The thing about NFTs is the connection between digital items and their authors. If you're like most art collectors you'd follow the author anyway. You'd buy one because you're a fan of the author and enter their nft sales funnel.
fnord77 5y ago
how does this help with enforcement of the license terms? There's no technological enforcement, so lawyers would need to be brought in... if legally the nft had the same standing as a regular license contract. So I claim this is worse than a regular license because you have to jump through crypto hoops that most people don't understand.
ramijames 5y ago
Adobe just integrated this exact functionality into their suite. NFTs to prove provenance, and embedded in the child product. It's pretty neat.
- soco 5y ago
  That proves that the published picture was run through Adobe suite and nothing else.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
dahart 5y ago
Photographers (and digital artists) commonly already use something called a “Certificate of Authenticity” or COA, a physical document signed by the artist verifying that the item is one of a batch, and that the batch has a fixed, limited size. NFTs aren’t providing anything beyond what a COA provides, and the COA comes with a physical handwritten signature. Neither is any actual protection against determined forgers. As an occasional artist and photographer, I wonder if the solution to authenticating and valuing digital art is to sell the copyrights along with only a single digital and/or physical copy of the art, and then delete it. Make it unique to the buyer the same way a sculpture or painting is unique.
- miracle2k 5y ago
  Yes. Except NFTs, for one reason or another, have introduced a whole new set of people to the idea of paying for an COA; they are suddenly really easy to buy, easy to sell, and the ledger creates a community of owners who recognize each other's COA as meaningful. That's incredibly powerful; because a physical COA in my cupboard that none of my friends gives a shit about is less interesting.

blue1 5y ago

One problem that I have noticed in the NFT space is that the platforms only deal with transaction between wallets, not persons. The association between wallets and persons is tenuous (by design). You don't know if you are buying from the real right holder (e.g. the author), and on the other side it is difficult to prove that the owner of a particular wallet is you.

schrijver 5y ago

How does this improve upon copyright in practical terms? Because finding out who the rights holder is becomes more straightforward? I’m not aware how minting an NFT works exactly, but wouldn’t the person to whom the NFT points still have to prove they’re the rights holder and have engaged in some legal contract for that claim to be valid?

amalcon 5y ago

I think this is kind of the idea, but it has basically the same problems as other areas. You're relying on meatspace legal and copyright systems to associate "ownership" / "right to use" with the NFT, but you could just use that same system to associate those rights with the purchaser directly.

capableweb 5y ago
The only tangible different is that once you've establish the meatspace laws, the ownership can be transferred on chain and still hold a valid claim, instead of having to result in meatspace in order to transfer it.
- schrijver 5y ago
  If you want to transfer ownership (copyright) within the traditional legal framework, you’ll also loose your say in what happens next, so you can’t guarantee that a subsequent change in NFT ownership automatically means a change in ownership of the rights. What you could do is retain the copyright yourself, but accord an open-ended copyright license (like the way oss licenses are written) that accords certain rights to the owner of the NFT (and have the license describe how to determine who is the owner of the NFT).
- cslarson 5y ago
  This is the value of blockchain in a nutshell. Programmable trust. All manner of tokens (represented things - both digital and not), can be moved, modified, leveraged, etc. It is a public ledger and api for trust. Probably people still under-appreciate the utility, liquidity, and overall productivity boon this will be.

KaiserPro 5y ago

But we already have a mechanism for licensing, its copyright. NFTs provide no new tools or even solutions for tracing, enforcing or indeed arbitrating licensing of a thing. Its just a hash. Photo stock sites already have perceptual hash tracing. However for them its useless as they only ever sell licenses to use the artwork, not "ownership". They still retain the original copyright, which allows them to sell licenses to use the image/sound/thing

sumeno 5y ago
> Its just a hash NFTs aren’t even a hash, they are a URL.
- miracle2k 5y ago
  IPFS urls, widely used, are a hash. Media data is also sometimes stored on chain; sometimes code is stored that generates the artwork.

jeffwass 5y ago

Here’s a general issue I don’t yet understand yet for NFT’s. Suppose you take an amazing photo (or create digital artwork), and pack it up as an NFT on platform A using token/blockchain technology Alpha. Alice buys this token, and has some sort of limited ownership of your picture. I (a nefarious user) take the same digital photo you displayed on your website, and sell it to Bob on platform B with blockchain Beta. I also take your digital photo, make some minor alterations and put it up again on Platform A with Blockchain alpha and sell it to Charlie. Alice, Bob, and Charlie all think they own the picture, and while they do own their own versions, how do we know Alice is the “right” owner of your photo? Especially in the future when you’re not around to confirm the version Alice has is the right one?

laurencei 5y ago
Yeah - I wondered about this exact issue too. Same as all the NFT "artwork" I see around. Why cant I just literally copy and paste the artwork, maybe change one single pixel, and re-mint it?
- jeffwass 5y ago
  But aside from re-minting it with alterations, you can mint the exact same digital artwork on different NFT platforms, so how do we know which platform is “right”?
  - Joker_vD 5y ago
    Well, you don't. Things don't have identities, not really, and so all the superstructures built upon such concepts collapse the moment when demonstrating this dirty philosophical secret becomes practical ― and digital entities are perfect for such demonstrations.
  - deltron3030 5y ago
    > so how do we know which platform is “right”? The right one is the one the original author of the artwork released it on. The thing about NFTs is the connection between digital items and their authors. If you're like most art collectors you'd follow the author anyway. You'd buy one because you're a fan of the author and enter their nft sales funnel.

fnord77 5y ago

how does this help with enforcement of the license terms? There's no technological enforcement, so lawyers would need to be brought in... if legally the nft had the same standing as a regular license contract. So I claim this is worse than a regular license because you have to jump through crypto hoops that most people don't understand.

ramijames 5y ago

Adobe just integrated this exact functionality into their suite. NFTs to prove provenance, and embedded in the child product. It's pretty neat.

soco 5y ago
That proves that the published picture was run through Adobe suite and nothing else.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

dahart 5y ago

Photographers (and digital artists) commonly already use something called a “Certificate of Authenticity” or COA, a physical document signed by the artist verifying that the item is one of a batch, and that the batch has a fixed, limited size. NFTs aren’t providing anything beyond what a COA provides, and the COA comes with a physical handwritten signature. Neither is any actual protection against determined forgers. As an occasional artist and photographer, I wonder if the solution to authenticating and valuing digital art is to sell the copyrights along with only a single digital and/or physical copy of the art, and then delete it. Make it unique to the buyer the same way a sculpture or painting is unique.

miracle2k 5y ago
Yes. Except NFTs, for one reason or another, have introduced a whole new set of people to the idea of paying for an COA; they are suddenly really easy to buy, easy to sell, and the ledger creates a community of owners who recognize each other's COA as meaningful. That's incredibly powerful; because a physical COA in my cupboard that none of my friends gives a shit about is less interesting.