4 ms·

the blockchain allows anybody to publish nfts that point to any media, so naturally there is a lot of spam and copy-minting. anybody can publish to OpenSea a Pi

• dmitriid 4y ago
  > does not mean it will be valued by the market as a Picasso There are innumerable examples of digital art being sold on OpenSea without any knowledge of the original authors, but presented as if it was from the original authors. > almost all of these "thefts" come in the form of social engineering and impersonation rather than forging the token itself. It literally doesn't matter if the token is forged. The theft is there, and NFTs (and blockchains in general) have literally no mechanism to prevent it. > a copy-mint of crypto punks is trivially easy to discern as a fake because its contract hash You keep pretending that stealing art is the same as stealing/forging the token that points something > compare this crypto art copy-minting to paintings like Salvator Mundi which countless experts have been investigating Who. Cares. There's an irrefutable fact: NFTs provide literally zero protections against art theft. It's gotten so bad that sites like DeviantArt now have automated tools to find stolen art on sites like OpenSea and report it to original artists. - NFT art sales are booming. Just without some artists' permission: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/nft-art-sales-are-booming-just-artists-permission-rcna10798 https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/nft-art-sales-are-boom... - Site Sells Famous Songs as NFTs Without Permission https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkpqyy/site-sells-famous-songs-as-nfts-without-permission-sparks-global-outrage https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkpqyy/site-sells-famous-son... - An artist died. Then thieves made NFTs of her work https://www.wired.co.uk/article/nft-fraud-qinni-art https://www.wired.co.uk/article/nft-fraud-qinni-art But sure. Keep trying to derail the discussion with Salvator Mundi
  • web4 4y ago
    you are right: it is trivially easy to publish any media file and assign an NFT to it and then list it for sale, and there is a lot of copyright infringement as a result. all of these articles claim widespread theft and stolen work, but a surprising lack of data on how much of that is actually sold considering all of those payments should be publicly traceable on the blockchain. imagine putting a Damien Hirst image on OpenSea only for nobody to purchase it. is this a complex form of art forgery and art theft? in some cases this process is automated by bot-scripts scraping DeviantArt, and the end result is like spam mail. maybe there is a buyer naive enough to purchase your Hirst image thinking it is authentically from the artist, and in that case I sympathize just as I do when an unsuspecting user falls for an email scam. it is also trivially easy to look at these scam tokens and realize they are not from the authentic collection they claim to be, or that the minter does not match the artist's public address, or that the artist is not even claiming to make nfts and therefore a nft of their work is unlikely to be authentic. if you look at art forgery in traditional media, not only is it rampant but it actually accounts for millions of dollars per year, and many high value paintings do not have a clear provenance and authenticity as this information is easily lost and altered over the course of history. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/fake-art-france-culture-spd https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/fake-art-...
    • dmitriid 4y ago
      > all of these articles claim widespread theft and stolen work, but a surprising lack of data on how much of that is actually sold considering all of those payments should be publicly traceable on the blockchain. Payments, yes. But not provenance. Because you'd have to find all the artists, then all their work, then sift through all the listings at OpenSea, and cross-reference that. Because the following statement from you is a blatant lie: > it is also trivially easy to look at these scam tokens and realize they are not from the authentic collection they claim to be No. It's impossible to say whether something is from a legitimate artist or not. > if you look at art forgery in traditional media, not only is it rampant but it actually accounts for millions of dollars per year NFT scams are significantly more rampant because stealing a digital image trivial. As is pretending someone you're not. Quote: "DeviantArt has sent 90,000 alerts about possible fraud to thousands of their users since then, company executives said. It’s now scanning for fraud across 4m newly minted NFTs each week. The number of alerts doubled from October to November, and grew by 300% from November to mid-December." [1] [1] https://www.theguardian.com/global/2022/jan/29/huge-mess-of-theft-artists-sound-alarm-theft-nfts-proliferates https://www.theguardian.com/global/2022/jan/29/huge-mess-of-...