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The worst thing is the constant and malicious lie being perpetuated. You do not own an NFT in any legal or moral sense. The ownership is not recognised in any

The worst thing is the constant and malicious lie being perpetuated. You do not own an NFT in any legal or moral sense. The ownership is not recognised in any country, by any court or international body. All you have is an entry in a logical database that says you own it. But unless you have signed a contract with the seller transferring or licensing copyright then it as meaningless as you buying a certificate saying you've named a planet.

password1 5y ago
The irony is that most NFT do not include any copyright or commercial rights. Only the "respectable" ones do, others are just a link to an image and a pinky promise that it won't be on another marketplace.
ugjka 5y ago
I remember one of my friends wanted to do an NFT of some sort and i jokingly remarked "I'll paypal you 10€ and I'll pretend I own something"
chollida1 5y ago
And most NFT's are just links that aren't embedded on the blockchain that could go away tomorrow or be switched to something else without any warning.
daenz 5y ago
Possession is nine-tenths of the law. If nobody can take it from you, you "own" it, and everything else follows from that. "It" being: your crypto identity bound to some metadata.
- threeseed 5y ago
  No the artist owns it. They have the copyright. So the funny part is that if you buy an NFT not only can I legally copy it but I can approach the artist, buy the copyright and then sue you for copyright infringement.
  - daenz 5y ago
    I said you own metadata bound to your crypto identity, not the thing that the artist is making into an NFT.
  - dvt 5y ago
    While this is (in most cases) true, you still own, say, a poster you bought of some artwork. The NFT is a sort of "poster" you own. You still own it, so I don't understand your criticism.
    - AlexandrB 5y ago
      Owning and NFT is more like owning a sign that says there's a poster on the wall in the next room that's yours. For many NFTs the poster may be removed at any time by a third party you have no influence over. All you own is the sign.
      - dvt 5y ago
        > Owning and NFT is more like owning a sign that says there's a poster on the wall in the next room that's yours. Even if this is true, okay: you still own a sign that says there's a poster on the wall in the next room that's yours. People own all kinds of things that I personally think are dumb: from beanie babies to baseball cards. If we have a problem with abstraction, people trade all kinds of abstract things: from options to futures to a veritable zoo of other derivatives. Again, not sure what the direct criticism here is.
    - threeseed 5y ago
      The difference is that people need your permission to make a copy of that poster. I can take your NFT image, duplicate it and use it however I want. And you have no legal or moral right to say no.
      - dvt 5y ago
        > people need your permission to make a copy of that poster. No they don't, I can literally walk in my friend's living room and take a picture of his poster. I can do that in the store, too, by the way. The "I can copy-paste it" is just a terrible and bad-faith argument.
- 0x500x79 5y ago
  Is this comment in support of NFTs or against NFTs? From what I have seen commonly the subject of the NFT is hosted somewhere not on the blockchain (possessed by someone else).
  - daenz 5y ago
    The comment is neutral. If the blockchain is decentralized, it's a lot harder to take the entries from people, but to your point, if it's hosted by a central entity, your ownership of anything is a lot weaker.
matheusmoreira 5y ago
Yeah. NFTs are not a bad idea but the current implementation is basically a scam. Ownership of these tokens means nothing, people pay for them and still own nothing. They could be good. Imagine if instead of the current licensing hell you could just buy an NFT that represents your ownership of a song, a film, a video game. Companies wouldn't be able to take it away from you remotely, you'd be able to resell it at a later date. Such a thing could actually make copyright more tolerable. Unfortunately this would probably require an actual legal framework around it to guarantee these rights.
- acdha 5y ago
  > Unfortunately this would probably require an actual legal framework around it to guarantee these rights. I'd go stronger to “would definitely require”. If companies wanted to offer this, there's no reason they couldn't right now so the question really needs to be how you'd get them to offer more consumer-friendly terms. One option is a legal requirement but that would be non-trivial to implement to avoid various scams (e.g. if I license a movie and sell it to you, how comfortable are they with the idea that I didn't save the decryption key when I legally had it?). The most interesting example I've seen of what this could look like is Movies Anywhere. My understanding is that Disney's motivation was preventing a single tech company like Apple, Amazon, Netflix, etc. from having a large enough share of the market that they'd be able to dictate terms to the movie studies the way Apple was able to use iTunes to push the music industry to be less exploitative. That only works with a list of trusted parties and seems to be about as much as I'd expect to see in the current climate.
rr808 5y ago
Even worse is that a bunch of NFTs are sold by people that didn't even own the art in the first place. https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7vxe7/people-are-stealing-art-and-turning-it-into-nfts https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7vxe7/people-are-stealing-a...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
legutierr 5y ago
"NFT" means "Non-fungible token". It means that one token of a type is not strictly equivalent to another token of the same type. It does not mean "a link to a JPEG that is hosted on OpenSea." > You do not own an NFT in any legal or moral sense. Often this is the case, but it doesn't need to be the case, it shouldn't be the case, and it was never intended to be the case. Yes, it is stupid that people are buying NFTs that are not linked to a legal or contractual grant of intellectual property. However, it is also the case that there are in fact NFTs being sold that do in fact attempt to convey an ownership right via contract.
- acdha 5y ago
  The problem is that the salespeople _frequently_ misrepresent NFTs as having legal meaning as a key part of the explanation for why you should pay so much for one and they _never_ mention that the same basis you'd need to convey the legal contract also means that you have a system you can use instead of a blockchain at much lower cost.
  - rich_sasha 5y ago
    Has this been tested in court? Common law is very flexible, and (IANAL) I wouldn’t be surprised it if recognised an NFT sale as one. Eg if both parties believe and represent the transaction as a sale at the time, does that in itself make it a sale, regardless of finer technicalities?
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - acdha 5y ago
      In most cases it doesn’t need to be tested: the party making the sale isn’t responsible for what some random cryptocurrency salesperson on social media claims. If the actual seller made misleading claims and the fine print didn’t clarify, it might be actionable. Typically what we see, however, is that the terms do note that you’re buying the link rather than its target.
- 5y ago
deergomoo 5y ago
Even aside from the baloney idea of ownership they offer, the thing that continues to baffle me about NFTs is that the very nature of them assumes that ownership is inherently valuable. Buying a painting allows me to hang it on the wall and admire it, where is where I derive the value of owning that painting. Buying a digital videogame allows me play it, even though there is no physical good (and is also a questionable definition of ownership due to DRM). Buying an NFT allows me to...show off I guess? It entirely separates the ownership from the ability the experience the owned thing, which I find bewildering. To me, 100% of the value of owning something is the ability to experience it. If I can freely experience something, then the concept of "owning" it is worthless. It would be different if it endowed some semblance of actual ownership, e.g. copyright, but that has been functioning perfectly well without blockchains for hundreds of years.
- temp438 5y ago
  > Buying an NFT allows me to...show off I guess? And buying some other piece of shit for millions doesn't, right? What's the difference? Why nfts are so important?
- gruez 5y ago
  >Buying a painting allows me to hang it on the wall and admire it, where is where I derive the value of owning that painting. That's true, but why do people spend millions on an original [famous artist] painting? If all they want to do is admire the painting, surely a high quality replica (ie. the type that can fool the naked eye) would be more than sufficient?
  - mikeg8 5y ago
    “People” in your comment being an extremely small class of wealthy individuals whom have the luxury of trading art. Most people would be totally fine purchasing a high quality replica, as that is their only option.
  - deergomoo 5y ago
    To me—and I'm not at all a high art person, so take this with a pinch of salt—I think the value in owning an original painting would be knowing that it is the original, crafted first hand by the artist, rather than the notion that it is mine and not someone else's (which to me continues to be a worthless concept in isolation). If The Lourve said I could keep the Mona Lisa above my mantelpiece forever more, I would not be looking to place bids on it. For digital art that obviously doesn't apply as the concept of "the original" artefact is borderline meaningless, however that leads neatly onto the other thing I dislike about NFTs, which is the introduction of artificial scarcity in a medium not burdened by it.
jtxt 5y ago
Yeah I think the art/jpeg part of it is somewhat meaningless. The creator can probably still can claim copyright, and of course anyone can copy it. At one level it's lust a link to URL that can be bought and traded. But also: proof of ownership of a NFT can be access to something else, that can be the "utility" defined by the NFT creator. Like the Board Ape Yacht Club gives access to parties. Others give other value add like YouTube revenue license rewards if the NFT shows up in an animation for example. (Quarter Machine) I think "utility" is where more of the potential is. It can be valuable with the people/company backing it and keeping their word.
- SAI_Peregrinus 5y ago
  Almost all of the time that "utility" isn't controlled on-chain, so it requires trusting the people/company backing it. So it doesn't need an NFT, they could just as easily maintain a database.
hnuser847 5y ago
> You do not own an NFT in any legal or moral sense. But you do own the very real sum of money that's earned by flipping one. Which is the whole point.
berberous 5y ago
This is arguing against a strawman. 1. Most NFT marketplaces, on which the vast majority of NFTs are sold, provide a default IP license and/or allow custom IP licenses: https://www.natlawreview.com/article/nft-license-breakdown-exploring-different-marketplaces-and-associated-license-issues https://www.natlawreview.com/article/nft-license-breakdown-e... There are some growing pains to be sure, but by and large, NFTs come with an IP license, despite your belief to the contrary. Your argument is akin to someone ranting, after the development of photographic prints, that a print is a malicious lie and you do not own anything in any legal or moral sense. 2. Increasingly, most savvy NFT projects provide, and savvy buyers demand, even greater IP rights. For example, here are the IP terms for Bored Ape Yacht Club (one of the top NFT projects in the space): https://boredapeyachtclub.com/#/terms https://boredapeyachtclub.com/#/terms Note that BAYC grants the NFT holder not only a license to use and re-sell the NFT, but the right to commercially exploit and create derivatives of the image itself.
jrs235 5y ago
It's like registering a star...

password1 5y ago

The irony is that most NFT do not include any copyright or commercial rights. Only the "respectable" ones do, others are just a link to an image and a pinky promise that it won't be on another marketplace.

ugjka 5y ago

I remember one of my friends wanted to do an NFT of some sort and i jokingly remarked "I'll paypal you 10€ and I'll pretend I own something"

chollida1 5y ago

And most NFT's are just links that aren't embedded on the blockchain that could go away tomorrow or be switched to something else without any warning.

daenz 5y ago

Possession is nine-tenths of the law. If nobody can take it from you, you "own" it, and everything else follows from that. "It" being: your crypto identity bound to some metadata.

threeseed 5y ago
No the artist owns it. They have the copyright. So the funny part is that if you buy an NFT not only can I legally copy it but I can approach the artist, buy the copyright and then sue you for copyright infringement.
- daenz 5y ago
  I said you own metadata bound to your crypto identity, not the thing that the artist is making into an NFT.
- dvt 5y ago
  While this is (in most cases) true, you still own, say, a poster you bought of some artwork. The NFT is a sort of "poster" you own. You still own it, so I don't understand your criticism.
  - AlexandrB 5y ago
    Owning and NFT is more like owning a sign that says there's a poster on the wall in the next room that's yours. For many NFTs the poster may be removed at any time by a third party you have no influence over. All you own is the sign.
    - dvt 5y ago
      > Owning and NFT is more like owning a sign that says there's a poster on the wall in the next room that's yours. Even if this is true, okay: you still own a sign that says there's a poster on the wall in the next room that's yours. People own all kinds of things that I personally think are dumb: from beanie babies to baseball cards. If we have a problem with abstraction, people trade all kinds of abstract things: from options to futures to a veritable zoo of other derivatives. Again, not sure what the direct criticism here is.
  - threeseed 5y ago
    The difference is that people need your permission to make a copy of that poster. I can take your NFT image, duplicate it and use it however I want. And you have no legal or moral right to say no.
    - dvt 5y ago
      > people need your permission to make a copy of that poster. No they don't, I can literally walk in my friend's living room and take a picture of his poster. I can do that in the store, too, by the way. The "I can copy-paste it" is just a terrible and bad-faith argument.
0x500x79 5y ago
Is this comment in support of NFTs or against NFTs? From what I have seen commonly the subject of the NFT is hosted somewhere not on the blockchain (possessed by someone else).
- daenz 5y ago
  The comment is neutral. If the blockchain is decentralized, it's a lot harder to take the entries from people, but to your point, if it's hosted by a central entity, your ownership of anything is a lot weaker.

matheusmoreira 5y ago

Yeah. NFTs are not a bad idea but the current implementation is basically a scam. Ownership of these tokens means nothing, people pay for them and still own nothing. They could be good. Imagine if instead of the current licensing hell you could just buy an NFT that represents your ownership of a song, a film, a video game. Companies wouldn't be able to take it away from you remotely, you'd be able to resell it at a later date. Such a thing could actually make copyright more tolerable. Unfortunately this would probably require an actual legal framework around it to guarantee these rights.

acdha 5y ago
> Unfortunately this would probably require an actual legal framework around it to guarantee these rights. I'd go stronger to “would definitely require”. If companies wanted to offer this, there's no reason they couldn't right now so the question really needs to be how you'd get them to offer more consumer-friendly terms. One option is a legal requirement but that would be non-trivial to implement to avoid various scams (e.g. if I license a movie and sell it to you, how comfortable are they with the idea that I didn't save the decryption key when I legally had it?). The most interesting example I've seen of what this could look like is Movies Anywhere. My understanding is that Disney's motivation was preventing a single tech company like Apple, Amazon, Netflix, etc. from having a large enough share of the market that they'd be able to dictate terms to the movie studies the way Apple was able to use iTunes to push the music industry to be less exploitative. That only works with a list of trusted parties and seems to be about as much as I'd expect to see in the current climate.

rr808 5y ago

Even worse is that a bunch of NFTs are sold by people that didn't even own the art in the first place. https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7vxe7/people-are-stealing-art-and-turning-it-into-nfts https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7vxe7/people-are-stealing-a...

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

legutierr 5y ago

"NFT" means "Non-fungible token". It means that one token of a type is not strictly equivalent to another token of the same type. It does not mean "a link to a JPEG that is hosted on OpenSea." > You do not own an NFT in any legal or moral sense. Often this is the case, but it doesn't need to be the case, it shouldn't be the case, and it was never intended to be the case. Yes, it is stupid that people are buying NFTs that are not linked to a legal or contractual grant of intellectual property. However, it is also the case that there are in fact NFTs being sold that do in fact attempt to convey an ownership right via contract.

acdha 5y ago
The problem is that the salespeople _frequently_ misrepresent NFTs as having legal meaning as a key part of the explanation for why you should pay so much for one and they _never_ mention that the same basis you'd need to convey the legal contract also means that you have a system you can use instead of a blockchain at much lower cost.
- rich_sasha 5y ago
  Has this been tested in court? Common law is very flexible, and (IANAL) I wouldn’t be surprised it if recognised an NFT sale as one. Eg if both parties believe and represent the transaction as a sale at the time, does that in itself make it a sale, regardless of finer technicalities?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - acdha 5y ago
    In most cases it doesn’t need to be tested: the party making the sale isn’t responsible for what some random cryptocurrency salesperson on social media claims. If the actual seller made misleading claims and the fine print didn’t clarify, it might be actionable. Typically what we see, however, is that the terms do note that you’re buying the link rather than its target.
5y ago

deergomoo 5y ago

Even aside from the baloney idea of ownership they offer, the thing that continues to baffle me about NFTs is that the very nature of them assumes that ownership is inherently valuable. Buying a painting allows me to hang it on the wall and admire it, where is where I derive the value of owning that painting. Buying a digital videogame allows me play it, even though there is no physical good (and is also a questionable definition of ownership due to DRM). Buying an NFT allows me to...show off I guess? It entirely separates the ownership from the ability the experience the owned thing, which I find bewildering. To me, 100% of the value of owning something is the ability to experience it. If I can freely experience something, then the concept of "owning" it is worthless. It would be different if it endowed some semblance of actual ownership, e.g. copyright, but that has been functioning perfectly well without blockchains for hundreds of years.

temp438 5y ago
> Buying an NFT allows me to...show off I guess? And buying some other piece of shit for millions doesn't, right? What's the difference? Why nfts are so important?
gruez 5y ago
>Buying a painting allows me to hang it on the wall and admire it, where is where I derive the value of owning that painting. That's true, but why do people spend millions on an original [famous artist] painting? If all they want to do is admire the painting, surely a high quality replica (ie. the type that can fool the naked eye) would be more than sufficient?
- mikeg8 5y ago
  “People” in your comment being an extremely small class of wealthy individuals whom have the luxury of trading art. Most people would be totally fine purchasing a high quality replica, as that is their only option.
- deergomoo 5y ago
  To me—and I'm not at all a high art person, so take this with a pinch of salt—I think the value in owning an original painting would be knowing that it is the original, crafted first hand by the artist, rather than the notion that it is mine and not someone else's (which to me continues to be a worthless concept in isolation). If The Lourve said I could keep the Mona Lisa above my mantelpiece forever more, I would not be looking to place bids on it. For digital art that obviously doesn't apply as the concept of "the original" artefact is borderline meaningless, however that leads neatly onto the other thing I dislike about NFTs, which is the introduction of artificial scarcity in a medium not burdened by it.

jtxt 5y ago

Yeah I think the art/jpeg part of it is somewhat meaningless. The creator can probably still can claim copyright, and of course anyone can copy it. At one level it's lust a link to URL that can be bought and traded. But also: proof of ownership of a NFT can be access to something else, that can be the "utility" defined by the NFT creator. Like the Board Ape Yacht Club gives access to parties. Others give other value add like YouTube revenue license rewards if the NFT shows up in an animation for example. (Quarter Machine) I think "utility" is where more of the potential is. It can be valuable with the people/company backing it and keeping their word.

SAI_Peregrinus 5y ago
Almost all of the time that "utility" isn't controlled on-chain, so it requires trusting the people/company backing it. So it doesn't need an NFT, they could just as easily maintain a database.

hnuser847 5y ago

> You do not own an NFT in any legal or moral sense. But you do own the very real sum of money that's earned by flipping one. Which is the whole point.

berberous 5y ago

This is arguing against a strawman. 1. Most NFT marketplaces, on which the vast majority of NFTs are sold, provide a default IP license and/or allow custom IP licenses: https://www.natlawreview.com/article/nft-license-breakdown-exploring-different-marketplaces-and-associated-license-issues https://www.natlawreview.com/article/nft-license-breakdown-e... There are some growing pains to be sure, but by and large, NFTs come with an IP license, despite your belief to the contrary. Your argument is akin to someone ranting, after the development of photographic prints, that a print is a malicious lie and you do not own anything in any legal or moral sense. 2. Increasingly, most savvy NFT projects provide, and savvy buyers demand, even greater IP rights. For example, here are the IP terms for Bored Ape Yacht Club (one of the top NFT projects in the space): https://boredapeyachtclub.com/#/terms https://boredapeyachtclub.com/#/terms Note that BAYC grants the NFT holder not only a license to use and re-sell the NFT, but the right to commercially exploit and create derivatives of the image itself.

jrs235 5y ago

It's like registering a star...