8 ms·

Similar lack of rights when you buy a signed print. At no point in that transaction is a copyright transferred to you.

by mattdesl 5y ago

krsdcbl 5y ago
This is a very accurate perspective i think: NFTs are "digital prints" of an artwork, not originals
- meheleventyone 5y ago
  I'd go further. Only NFTs that have the image stored on chain are signed digital copies. It's the association between the signature and the actual data that's important and if that can rot it's bad. Which only leads on to the next problem of how you associate the signature with a real human.
- have_faith 5y ago
  All digital artwork are "prints" when you save or transfer the work. There's really no concept of "original" in digital as they are indistinguishable. NFT's attempt to add time as a metric of scarcity (this artwork exists on this blockchain at this point in time, regardless of copies). It relies very heavily on a social and cultral decision to place value on this new form of provenance.
  - podgaj 5y ago
    If there is no original than all digital artwork is worthless because it can be endlessly copied which would diminish its value. Rarity is what dictates price, not only social decisions. If I make an NFT of my photograph and sell it to someone, what is stopping me from making copies and selling it to someone else again? Or giving it away? Nothing. This will crash the price of an NFT if the NFT's value was dictated by the artwork. So NFT's are just bitcoin, another scam.
    - have_faith 5y ago
      That's the big question. Will there be any cultral shift in recognising NFT's as legitimate signals of "value" after the hype dies down? You can stretch the hype train out by convincing some big brands to get on board, this will push the price up just by force of recoginition but are the fundamentals sound for what values the NFT? as like you say, there's no real scarcity and we still rely on meat space for settling real disagreements about ownership.
    - matheusmoreira 5y ago
      > If there is no original than all digital artwork is worthless because it can be endlessly copied which would diminish its value. Digital art is worthless, though. It's as you said. There are no original copies, all of them are equivalent. They can be trivially and endlessly copied. Once created, the cost of creating more copies might as well be zero. It's the artist's labor that's valuable. It's the artists themselves who are scarce.
      - nybble41 5y ago
        The art itself has value even if all the copies are equally "original", interchangeable, and superabundant. Put another way: there may not be any change in value between one copy and two copies, but there is a big difference between one copy and zero copies.
        matheusmoreira 5y ago
        Of course. At zero copies, the art does not exist. At one copy, it exists. The artist's job is to generate that initial copy. This is what all human intellectual work boils down to: discovering data, numbers whose bits are set just right. Once that initial copy is found, any number of copies can be created and distributed at zero cost. Value is determined by supply and demand. If supply is infinite, value must be zero no matter what the demand is.
- threeseed 5y ago
  NFTs are a public proof of purchase. They aren't digital prints in any sense of the word.
  - tsujamin 5y ago
    hey siri: set a reminder to publish my grocery bill on the blockchain
  - jrochkind1 5y ago
    And a public proof that you purchased the NFT, not the artwork itself or any particular license or rights in it. As the OP mentions, people are selling NFT's with URLs pointing to art without the permission or involvement of the artist. This demonstrates that ownership of an NFT does not "prove" anything about ownership related to the art itself.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
KaiserPro 5y ago
Exactly, you have bought the image and the license to display that image as it was delivered to you. You cannot then sell copies of it to someone else. (well you can but not legally.....)
- mattdesl 5y ago
  I have many NFTs that I have purchased, and although there was no license agreement (just as with signed prints), it is reasonably expected that I may display that art (on my digital or physical walls, or in some other fashion). I can of course sell these tokens to others (again, as with signed prints), but if I attempt to copy/clone the tokens and distribute more, I enter into legal/ethical grey area (again, just as with signed prints). Somewhat related, see MSCHF's latest work: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/art-pranksters-sell-one-real-warhol-print-amid-999-fake-ones-180978975/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/art-pranksters-sel...
  - Vinnl 5y ago
    But... There's no legal grey area? And the ethical grey area doesn't need NFTs - that could be served just as well by the artist asking people other than the buyer not to copy it?
threeseed 5y ago
I have dozens of signed prints and it is true that all you get is an accompanied verification document and not any form of legal ownership over the original. But what you do get is a guarantee from (a) the author and (b) the fact that prints are reasonably difficult to duplicate that there will only be a limited number in circulation. And this enforced scarcity is what makes it valuable even though it's just a print of the original. If NFTs could limit duplication of digital art that would be something but right it seems like they are more akin to a payment system like PayPal only psuedo-public.
- mattdesl 5y ago
  Many signed prints I own do not even include a verification document (not all artists distribute this). NFTs do not need to limit duplication; the tokens are already unique, as each is addressable to a different contract hash. This is why, although there are many copies of the CryptoPunks contract for example, there is only one CryptoPunks token that tends to have a market around it[1]. Those tokens are linked with a contract address that has become widely recognized as stemming from the original project. [1] - https://etherscan.io/token/0xb47e3cd837ddf8e4c57f05d70ab865de6e193bbb#readContract https://etherscan.io/token/0xb47e3cd837ddf8e4c57f05d70ab865d...
  - threeseed 5y ago
    I am not talking about the NFT but about the artwork. If you had an image file format that embedded an NFT and every device would refuse to allow copies then that would be something. But right now NFTs seem pointless to me because I can always just copy the underlying image once I see it online.
    - mattdesl 5y ago
      I answered a similar question here[1]. The economic value of art has historically been tied to the scarcity of access to its media. NFT presents an alternative paradigm that separates the signature (artist-signed token) from the artistic media (image, GIF, conceptual art project, etc), allowing the former to remain scarce & uniquely transferable while the latter remains abundant & widely accessible. [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29160090 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29160090
Ensorceled 5y ago
Some important differences: The print is beautiful and hanging on my wall. The print won't evaporate when the url suddenly points to a server that was shutdown from lack of payment. I know I bought a print, nobody was trying to trick me into thinking it was the original. And, most importantly of all, the artist got paid.
- mattdesl 5y ago
  The NFT-signed work is beautiful and also hanging on my walls (both digital, such as social media, and physical, in that I own prints representing the tokens, signed by the artists who have distributed the same NFTs). The media does not evaporate as it is either on-chain, or distributed via IPFS (ie: peer-to-peer rather than a central server). None of the artists I have purchased NFTs from have tried to trick me (including Anders Hoff, mentioned in the OP article, who has distributed his work as an NFT). And, most importantly, the artists and non-profit organizations in the arts are getting paid via NFT sales. :)
  - snarf21 5y ago
    And I can copy that url off of the chain, pay nothing, print it out and hang it on my wall. You bought nothing. If you want to support an artist, give them money. NFTs are the new penny stocks. Pump and dump.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - threeseed 5y ago
    But you could have done this with a credit card. And I think for most people getting a piece of paper, physically signed by the author stating that it's their work is far more valuable than some UUID on a computer.
    - mattdesl 5y ago
      Some NFT platforms also support credit cards. But, I'd rather buy art in a way that doesn't include exploitative third parties that take a significant cut (Stripe, Shopify, PayPal, currency exchange fees when paying an artist in another country, etc). For reference, the last NFT I purchased on Hicetnunc.xyz had a protocol fee of 0.002947 XTZ (around 1¢ USD) and a platform fee of 2.5%, the rest of the sale went directly to the artist's wallet. To your second point; this remains to be seen—society can place value on many different abstract concepts, "ink on paper" may not be the only valuable vehicle for art and culture.

Similar lack of rights when you buy a signed print. At no point in that transaction is a copyright transferred to you.

krsdcbl 5y ago

This is a very accurate perspective i think: NFTs are "digital prints" of an artwork, not originals

meheleventyone 5y ago
I'd go further. Only NFTs that have the image stored on chain are signed digital copies. It's the association between the signature and the actual data that's important and if that can rot it's bad. Which only leads on to the next problem of how you associate the signature with a real human.
have_faith 5y ago
All digital artwork are "prints" when you save or transfer the work. There's really no concept of "original" in digital as they are indistinguishable. NFT's attempt to add time as a metric of scarcity (this artwork exists on this blockchain at this point in time, regardless of copies). It relies very heavily on a social and cultral decision to place value on this new form of provenance.
- podgaj 5y ago
  If there is no original than all digital artwork is worthless because it can be endlessly copied which would diminish its value. Rarity is what dictates price, not only social decisions. If I make an NFT of my photograph and sell it to someone, what is stopping me from making copies and selling it to someone else again? Or giving it away? Nothing. This will crash the price of an NFT if the NFT's value was dictated by the artwork. So NFT's are just bitcoin, another scam.
  - have_faith 5y ago
    That's the big question. Will there be any cultral shift in recognising NFT's as legitimate signals of "value" after the hype dies down? You can stretch the hype train out by convincing some big brands to get on board, this will push the price up just by force of recoginition but are the fundamentals sound for what values the NFT? as like you say, there's no real scarcity and we still rely on meat space for settling real disagreements about ownership.
  - matheusmoreira 5y ago
    > If there is no original than all digital artwork is worthless because it can be endlessly copied which would diminish its value. Digital art is worthless, though. It's as you said. There are no original copies, all of them are equivalent. They can be trivially and endlessly copied. Once created, the cost of creating more copies might as well be zero. It's the artist's labor that's valuable. It's the artists themselves who are scarce.
    - nybble41 5y ago
      The art itself has value even if all the copies are equally "original", interchangeable, and superabundant. Put another way: there may not be any change in value between one copy and two copies, but there is a big difference between one copy and zero copies.
      - matheusmoreira 5y ago
        Of course. At zero copies, the art does not exist. At one copy, it exists. The artist's job is to generate that initial copy. This is what all human intellectual work boils down to: discovering data, numbers whose bits are set just right. Once that initial copy is found, any number of copies can be created and distributed at zero cost. Value is determined by supply and demand. If supply is infinite, value must be zero no matter what the demand is.
threeseed 5y ago
NFTs are a public proof of purchase. They aren't digital prints in any sense of the word.
- tsujamin 5y ago
  hey siri: set a reminder to publish my grocery bill on the blockchain
- jrochkind1 5y ago
  And a public proof that you purchased the NFT, not the artwork itself or any particular license or rights in it. As the OP mentions, people are selling NFT's with URLs pointing to art without the permission or involvement of the artist. This demonstrates that ownership of an NFT does not "prove" anything about ownership related to the art itself.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

KaiserPro 5y ago

Exactly, you have bought the image and the license to display that image as it was delivered to you. You cannot then sell copies of it to someone else. (well you can but not legally.....)

mattdesl 5y ago
I have many NFTs that I have purchased, and although there was no license agreement (just as with signed prints), it is reasonably expected that I may display that art (on my digital or physical walls, or in some other fashion). I can of course sell these tokens to others (again, as with signed prints), but if I attempt to copy/clone the tokens and distribute more, I enter into legal/ethical grey area (again, just as with signed prints). Somewhat related, see MSCHF's latest work: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/art-pranksters-sell-one-real-warhol-print-amid-999-fake-ones-180978975/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/art-pranksters-sel...
- Vinnl 5y ago
  But... There's no legal grey area? And the ethical grey area doesn't need NFTs - that could be served just as well by the artist asking people other than the buyer not to copy it?

threeseed 5y ago

I have dozens of signed prints and it is true that all you get is an accompanied verification document and not any form of legal ownership over the original. But what you do get is a guarantee from (a) the author and (b) the fact that prints are reasonably difficult to duplicate that there will only be a limited number in circulation. And this enforced scarcity is what makes it valuable even though it's just a print of the original. If NFTs could limit duplication of digital art that would be something but right it seems like they are more akin to a payment system like PayPal only psuedo-public.

mattdesl 5y ago
Many signed prints I own do not even include a verification document (not all artists distribute this). NFTs do not need to limit duplication; the tokens are already unique, as each is addressable to a different contract hash. This is why, although there are many copies of the CryptoPunks contract for example, there is only one CryptoPunks token that tends to have a market around it[1]. Those tokens are linked with a contract address that has become widely recognized as stemming from the original project. [1] - https://etherscan.io/token/0xb47e3cd837ddf8e4c57f05d70ab865de6e193bbb#readContract https://etherscan.io/token/0xb47e3cd837ddf8e4c57f05d70ab865d...
- threeseed 5y ago
  I am not talking about the NFT but about the artwork. If you had an image file format that embedded an NFT and every device would refuse to allow copies then that would be something. But right now NFTs seem pointless to me because I can always just copy the underlying image once I see it online.
  - mattdesl 5y ago
    I answered a similar question here[1]. The economic value of art has historically been tied to the scarcity of access to its media. NFT presents an alternative paradigm that separates the signature (artist-signed token) from the artistic media (image, GIF, conceptual art project, etc), allowing the former to remain scarce & uniquely transferable while the latter remains abundant & widely accessible. [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29160090 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29160090

Ensorceled 5y ago

Some important differences: The print is beautiful and hanging on my wall. The print won't evaporate when the url suddenly points to a server that was shutdown from lack of payment. I know I bought a print, nobody was trying to trick me into thinking it was the original. And, most importantly of all, the artist got paid.

mattdesl 5y ago
The NFT-signed work is beautiful and also hanging on my walls (both digital, such as social media, and physical, in that I own prints representing the tokens, signed by the artists who have distributed the same NFTs). The media does not evaporate as it is either on-chain, or distributed via IPFS (ie: peer-to-peer rather than a central server). None of the artists I have purchased NFTs from have tried to trick me (including Anders Hoff, mentioned in the OP article, who has distributed his work as an NFT). And, most importantly, the artists and non-profit organizations in the arts are getting paid via NFT sales. :)
- snarf21 5y ago
  And I can copy that url off of the chain, pay nothing, print it out and hang it on my wall. You bought nothing. If you want to support an artist, give them money. NFTs are the new penny stocks. Pump and dump.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- threeseed 5y ago
  But you could have done this with a credit card. And I think for most people getting a piece of paper, physically signed by the author stating that it's their work is far more valuable than some UUID on a computer.
  - mattdesl 5y ago
    Some NFT platforms also support credit cards. But, I'd rather buy art in a way that doesn't include exploitative third parties that take a significant cut (Stripe, Shopify, PayPal, currency exchange fees when paying an artist in another country, etc). For reference, the last NFT I purchased on Hicetnunc.xyz had a protocol fee of 0.002947 XTZ (around 1¢ USD) and a platform fee of 2.5%, the rest of the sale went directly to the artist's wallet. To your second point; this remains to be seen—society can place value on many different abstract concepts, "ink on paper" may not be the only valuable vehicle for art and culture.