> NFTs are a scam and are retroactively obsoleted by digital signatures
I'm not one to ever defend NFTs, but this is not right. Suppose I bought an extremely trendy natural number k ∈ ℤ and I have a signature σ from its inventor that says "doomrobo owns k". Suppose in a year the trend has passed and I'd like to sell k. How do I transfer ownership to someone else? Clearly sending σ doesn't suffice, since σ is public. Do I need a new signature?
Ok different setup: σ is actually a signature from me and the inventor saying "the non-inventor pubkey that signed of this message is the owner of k". How do I transfer σ now? Do I send my signing secret key? Who makes sure I deleted my copy of the signing key?
The NFT would contain "$doomrobo_public_key owns $k as of $date" signed with the minter's private key. When you decide to sell someone the NFT you append "$new_owner_public_key owns $k as of $date" to the NFT and sign it with your private key: this establishes a secure and verifiable chain of ownership.
You can do the same thing with blockchain NFTs, just mint another blockchain NFT with the same content. You can say "well, the NFT that was minted first is the true original" but the same is true of the "double sent" digital signature NFT, one will be dated more recently than the other, which affords one identical guarantees of authenticity to the blockchain NFT.
> "$doomrobo_public_key owns $k as of $date" signed with the minter's private key
If you mean the minter could sign multiple owners of $k, of course that’s true, but that’s like saying that a painter could paint the same thing twice or sell printed copies of their paintings. Of course they can, and if they claim that each one is unique they’re likely to find that people don’t value their stuff much.
It's not the same as selling printed copies or painting multiple painting. It's verifying that two different people 'own' the same painting but neither of them has guaranteed rights to it.
How does the receiver of such a transfer know that the transfer is final? There's no way for them to know that an "earlier" transfer of same item won't show up days later.
That doesn't help you know the transfer is final, it just gives you a timestamp that the transfer occurred at which somebody reputable has attested to. You can't know that the owner didn't sign a transfer to some other buyer with an earlier timestamp.
Indeed, but NFT enthusiasts would say that the replicas are not valid because they were not originally minted by the trusted author, of course, nothing is stopping the author from minting multiple NFTs of the same content so the point is moot.
Why would you want the minter to be prevented from minting multiple NFRs of the same content? The content is totally moot! It’s the ownership of the scarce token which the author claims uniquely represents the content that people are valuing. Obviously if the author is minting multiple tokens and claiming they all uniquely represent the same piece of content, most likely no one is going to value those tokens much. None of this strikes me as odd or troublesome. It’s how all collectibles have worked long before NFTs.
Wouldn't the author be different if you just minted a copy? So if the original is from a trust/known entity (like an IRL company or suitably famous artist) this doesn't work. The list of trusted entities could be centralized, crowd-sourced, hand-managed, or anything else; let people decide who they trust to make those determinations and let them switch between them at will.
> Wouldn't the author be different if you just minted a copy?
The problem being described above is the possibility of the trusted author minting multiple digital signature NFTs for the same content. A reseller can't create a copy because they can't sign a message conferring ownership from the trusted source without their private key.
The problem of how to associate a NFT with a physical object is a different one from the transfer/spending problem.
I think that is the "minting" problem.
An artist simply signing stuff does not even prove that a physical object corresponding to the token exists.
I like to think of other use cases, like real estate or stock options. If you talk about a plot of land, it seems feasible to find a unique identifier (you could even involve the government).
Edit: HN does not allow me any more replies right now, so I have to leave it at that.
The reason why a "government signature on the deed" would achieve the same thing is because we trust on the government to keep a proper ledger. And the government asks for a lot of money for a transfer.
> I like to think of other use cases, like real estate or stock options. If you talk about a plot of land, it seems feasible to find a unique identifier (you could even involve the government).
A deed digitally signed by the government's private key satisfies this need without a blockchain.
You seem to be suggesting that a problem with NFTs is that the artist can mint multiple copies of their artwork, possibly using secret additional private keys.
The answer is that this is not a problem, because the whole point is knowing who the creator of the NFT is, and beeple trying to create additional copies using a secret wallet but not telling anyone will be treated by the market the same as me minting a copy of a beeple piece.
Its an analogy and diverts from the original point. We were talking about how you were going to solve double spends without a chain.
You point about minting another is an interesting point but its not a double spend so we veer off the topic.
If we take your point then its the same as saying anyone can create a new crypto and call it Bitcoin. If I have an OG Bitcoin and you have a fake
one then you can steel my real one. No you cant.
The reason is that people discern what Bitcoin is vs. other coins.
NFT cooy/paste is a problem but it is a distinct and different problem to double spend.
> We were talking about how you were going to solve double spends without a chain.
"Double spend" is a cryptocurrency problem, NFTs do not have this problem since unlike "currencies" the goal is to create a "non fungible" record of ownership for an off-chain asset; a chain of digital signatures satisfies this need, the double spend issue is not relevant to the stated use-case.
The genesis of this discussion is “NFTs are a scam and are retroactively obsoleted by digital signatures”. I basically said “how to avoid double spend in digital signatures”, someone replied “but you can clone NFTs!”. I said “yes but that is different”.
You are correct double spend is not a problem with NFT because they piggy back on crypto layers.
However double spend is a problem with just digital signatures that “retroactively obsoleted” NFTs.
Since there are multiple people commenting and steering the thread in different directions I feel this is being filibustered. So ill stop replying. Im exhausted!
> However double spend is a problem with just digital signatures that “retroactively obsoleted” NFTs.
As I already stated, this is not true. Nobody can stop an author from minting two different blockchain NFTs pointing to the same content, there's no difference between that and "double spending" a digital signature NFT. At the end of the day, the only thing the NFT does is prove "the author authorized this verbal statement of ownership", a digitally signed text file does exactly the same thing.
The only difference between a fungible token and a non-fungible token is its fungibility: everything else is the same. The stated use case for both is "I want to know for certain who owns something". A chain of digital signatures fails to satisfy that need. Please stop being so assertive about something you clearly don't know anything about: there are tons of useful complaints about how people are using NFTs, but this is not one of them.
A semantic distinction without an actual difference. At the end of the day all an NFT does is state "author X gives ownership of Y to Z", if you trust the public key of X a signed text file stating "author X gives ownership of Y to Z" gives you identical guarantees to a blockchain NFT stating the same thing. Nothing stops author X from minting a blockchain NFT that states "author X gives ownership of Y to Z" and also an additional blockchain NFT stating "author X gives ownership of Y to Q"... it's literally just a digitally signed string.
What blockchains provide is transaction ordering as a service. If Y is an NFT, what prevents that from happening is the code on the blockchain: the same kind of code (literally, on Ethereum) that prevents Y from being a fungible token for a cryptocurrency that they send to two people (aka "double spend").
If Y is not an NFT, but you know the original owner X, and you wish to create an NFT, the same kind of mechanisms work: the first time you attempt to assign ownership is the canonical one. Which you seemed to get up-thread, you just failed to "do the math" to see why digital signatures alone don't support that as you are so sure cryptocurrencies have no value.
If you send two digital signatures to two people claiming they both own something, the big issue is that the second person might not even know the first person exists. You need some kind of mechanism to invalidate the second one by exposing the first one in a trustless global ledger of events.... that's what blockchains provide.
If you only care about the semantics of disputes--which is potentially fair for claims over a physical object: it acts as a kind of "second factor"--you get a long way by just including the entire chain back to the root whenever you transfer ownership, allowing people to show prominence over other chains they obviously dominate...
...but any time there is a conflict--and not just on the original sale!--in your histories you can't compare timestamps to resolve the dispute as you can't trust them: digital signatures cannot show that one thing happened before the other thing as any timestamp is just data being signed, attached by the signer, and is meaningless.
To resolve these conflicts you need to use your distributed ledger to establish that no such signature has been signed previously: you need a way to authoritatively assign prominence. If you have a solution for this, what you have invented is a cryptocurrency and could be used as such (as there is no relevant difference between fungible and non-fungible tokens).
(And note that this is true even if you try to solve this by using some complex web-of trust of a ton of random third-parties or overlapping sets of parties that different people haphazardly might choose to trust instead of a linear blockchain... you are just talking about systems like Holochain or Stellar or Avalanche instead of systems like Bitcoin or Ethereum.)
> all an NFT does is state "author X gives ownership of Y to Z",
Incorrect. As @saurik says, but I'll just restate: an NFT also tells you the ordering of all such statements within one context (a single blockchain). So you can know whether this was the first such transfer by this owner or a subsequent one. This is the entire purpose of distributed databases, including blockchains.
Actually you can’t know it was by an ‘owner’ because nfts are not tied to the real world. You own nothing but the digital signature.
There are so many problems being skated over here about provenance and ownership and nfts provide nothing of value in that domain, they’re just a get rich quick scheme.
And yet all the talk is not about the signature, but the thing it refers to. Why is that distinction constantly elided? Is it because the digital signature has no value on its own?
It's because there is no other meaningful way to "own" the thing the signature refers to, if you apply a concept of ownership as you would to a physical piece of art.
Being in physical possession of the bytes to a JPEG is not what gives people the sense that they own this piece of art in the way they might own a painting, because the bytes are so cheaply copied.
Owning the intellectual property behind a JPEG is an entirely different kind of ownership; the value is in the commercial exploitation of those rights, and the buyer is now taking over from the creator in being responsible for said exploitation to get their money's worth. This is not what artists or art collectors want.
The whole point is to artificially recreate the traditional experience of ownership, but for immaterial/digital goods. People talk about owning the work (or an edition of it), not the signature, because that is the whole point of the exercise.
Immaterial artworks such as video art, performances etc. are already being sold in the art market; what you get is a piece of paper stating that you own the work. It's exactly the same as an NFT.
It may seem utterly useless for people who don't care about owning editions of immaterial works of art, but there is nothing scammy about it. It is done entirely in earnest.
Of course there are other ways to meaningfully own the digital artwork, you listed some in your response:
You created the image. You own the copyright to the image (which has legal weight). You may restrict distribution or reproduction in those situations.
These are all more meaningfully ownership than owning a digital receipt on the blockchain pointing to a url on a 3rd party site, which is more akin to buying a star or a piece of the moon from somebody who sets up a website and purports to be selling these ineffable things.
I disagree with you about the point of NFTs, the point of them IMO is to provide cover for ponzi schemes and convince marks parting with their cash that they are buying into a get rich quick scheme in which they'll get rich and someone else will be left holding the bag when they sell their receipt for digital art to someone else.
The references to art markets, asset tracking, provenance, new technology etc etc are just indirection used to distract from the fundamental transaction - give me money (including really high transaction fees for the marketplace) for this worthless receipt which says you own* this digital lion pic, unique amongst thousands of other similar lion pics because it has a cigar or an eye patch. No wonder companies like Nike, Games companies and football clubs and are rushing to take part too and sell fans NFTs, they can't lose!
* For certain values of own not conferring any rights over the image whatsoever.
> Of course there are other ways to meaningfully own the digital artwork, you listed some in your response:
By my count you listed just one - owning the copyright. But as I said, while owning intellectual property is certainly meaningful (and can be valuable), it is not art collecting. There is a reason why there exists no art market where people are trading copyright claims.
As a collector, I don't want to be in the business of managing an intellectual property licensing enterprise. Yet, I want the artwork I own to become a well-known, celebrated cultural object; the artist also wants this, and thankfully - incentivised and empowered by still owning the copyright - will try to manage their career to achieve this.
We can all agree that crypto lends itself to rampant and unrestricted speculation / gambling, which attracts all kinds of people looking for a cash grab or get-rich scheme. Those speculative bubbles have been going on for years, and in all likelihood will continue. It's an issue that artists and collectors in this space are struggling to deal with; people don't like that new releases are sold out in minutes, because flippers and their bots think they can make a profit (this is not dissimilar to event ticketing issues).
However, artists who have experimented with blockchain 10 years ago, were not looking for marks to scam. While pics of lions will go up and down in price, and people who bought even respectable art at the height of the bubble will be looking at a loss in resale value, this market will not disappear; it provides a product that artists and collectors find useful.
I am not of the opinion that this will be as world-changing and all-encompassing as web3 proponents proclaim. Art collection is a niche in the real world, and it will be a slightly larger niche in the digital realm.
Creating something is distinct from owning the copyright (though many jurisdictions automatically assign to creators unless otherwise assigned). For example illustrators for hire immediately assign copyright to someone else, so these are distinct.
The art market is a racket entirely divorced from value, if you want to emulate that, good luck to you, but know what you're getting into, the comparison with the manipulated and celebrity led current art market is entirely unflattering to NFTs as it shows them up for what they are - a get rich quick scheme.
I think this market will disappear when the cryptocurrency bubble bursts, which seems imminent now it has mainstream attention again and with the coming withdrawal of stimulus.
I think you are confusing the image of an NFT with the token itself. That two tokens point to the same JPG (for example) doesn't make them the same NFT. They are two distinct tokens.
You just invent a thing called notaries. You'll have to go back in time to do it since they already exist but that's besides the point. Anyways, a notary puts their reputation/legal liability on the line and counter signs your transaction. Since they've been granted license by a real legal entity with guns and jails they commit to verifying a transaction occurred at X time.
Monies for the transaction can be put into escrow with a third party (you'll need to go back in time to invent that too). When the notary notifies the escrow holder of the signatures they can release the monies.
When you have a legal system to enforce contracts and people put their own money or legal liability on the line two parties don't need to trust one another to conduct transactions. People buy expensive shit all the time. They don't need to trust each other with the money or valuables because they involve third parties that proffer up (staking if you will) liability to let the two parties conduct transactions.
The blockchain model replaces the staked liability with "expensive" proof of whatever. The only problem is monied entities can these proof systems. They can afford to run a majority of miners, stake the most (or spam stake offerings), or whatever otherwise supposedly expensive resource. They're only expensive resources if you naively assume all mining will be done by randos in their bedrooms.
Blockchains are just a way to do something almost no one needs in a slow expensive way.
You can require edition number / total copies in the original signed claim. Beyond that, you take it to the courts, which is the same thing you would need to do if the same resource was reminded on blockchain. The blockchain may only make it easier to detect a double mint.
No it doesn't, because you can simply keep selling the "old" version with the signature that say that you are the owner. It is digital, so you can make an an endless number of copies.
You can do the exact same thing with a blockchain NFT - there's absolutely no difference in terms of outcome. Each "sale" generates a unique digital signature NFT because the public key of the person buying is incorporated as part of the cryptographic signature.
Every sale is on the blockchain, so if somebody creates multiple sales of the same item, it would immediately be visible. Of course it depends on the implementation, how do you identify an object?
Leonardo could still create one NFT saying "this is ownership of my painting of the woman that always looks at the beholder" and another saying "this is ownership of my painting "Mona Lisa" and it would perhaps not be immediately clear that they are the same painting.
Nevertheless, that is the "minting" problem and not the "spending" (or transfer) problem.
Edit: HN does not allow me any more replies at this point, sorry.
I want to add, while I suppose in reality people would settle for specific blockchains (like you can identify the Bitcoin blockchain), I can see a problem for NFTs. As long as there is not the ONE blockchain for NFT ownership, it would be difficult to prevent somebody "selling" the same thing on different NFTs.
Even if the seller says "xyz is the official blockchain", it does not really solve the problem, as they could just say that several times for different blockchains. It does not actually add new information (signing something and putting it on blockchain xyz is equivalent to signing something, putting it on blockchain xyz, and saying "xyz is the official blockchain for my NFTs").
Not sure if you understand how public key cryptography works?
The artists says "this is my key" to their public key. Then they can use their key to sign things, and people can verify the signature because they can check that it belongs to the public key, which the artist has publicly announced.
Obviously you need a way to identify the real artist. For example if they put their public key on their official web site, it would be a pretty good indicator.
People also used to create chains of trust with public key infrastructure. Maybe you trust Bob, and Bob trusts Alice, and Alice has personally met the artist at Burning Man and verified their key there.
Or you go to the government and let them provide a register of identities. In any case it is a separate problem.
If you can't verify the artist, don't buy the NFT, or only buy it at a discount, accounting for the risk. Forgeries are a problem with physical works of art, too.
> Obviously you need a way to identify the real artist
Thats the point though. Nothing about the blockchain has anything to do with this part, and this is really the only part that matters.
So, once again, my point stands. The private key has nothing to do with identifying the real artist. Instead, it is something else entirely that identifies the real artist.
> on their official web site
So then the official website is what is doing the identifying here, of what the real art it. Not the blockchain. It is the artist themselves, saying "This art is the real one", not cryptography.
It is not proof of work, or proof of signed private keys. Instead, it is proof of "official website".
> In any case it is a separate problem.
It is the only problem that matters. The actual way to identify the real artist, separate from the blockchain, is what is actually doing all of the heavy lifting here. The private key isn't doing anything on the important part.
But you can't prove ownership of the actual art, with an NFT.
You can only prove ownership of that specific crypto transaction, which might be just a fake NFT, or duplicate.
There is nothing about crypto that actually proves it was the "real" NFT, or real art.
You need something else to actually prove that you own the "real" piece of art or NFT.
> Not identifying creators
If you are unable to identify creators then you are unable to prove ownership, because that NFT could just be a fake one, or even a duplicate that the creator has issued many times without you knowing it.
With crypto alone, you'd only be able to prove that you own something that might just be a fake or duplicate, and anyone can make as many fakes or duplicates as they want, so that's not really proving ownership.
You are conflating several issues. Yes, a creator presumably would have ways to cheat the system, for example by selling the same thing on different blockchains (as mentioned elsewhere). But eventually they would be revealed to be frauds and presumably the worth of their creations would plummet.
To verify the identity of a creator is a solvable problem, though, and is also yet another issue than the "sell it multiple times" problem.
You bought a NFT on some blockchain that exists now, you didn't buy the number. I can sell that same number to someone else, and I could print a big picture of it on fancy paper in a nice frame and afix a hologram seal of authenticity. You owning the NFT of that number doesn't give you any rights to that sale, just as my framed picture doesn't give me any rights over the NFT.
Let's say I create a piece of digital art and create an NFT out of it. The NFT somehow starts increasing in value. Then I copy my original digital art-asset and perhaps use a Photo-Shop filter to make it have a different hue. I turn that into another NFT. And I keep on doing this for all colors of the rainbow.
What prevents me from creating new NFTs with the same or slightly modified underlying digital asset?
It is worse than that, there are no pixels! The NFT is a short string, usually a URL. It’s effectively a QR code! You can create as many copies
as you like. The “value” of an NFT comes in somehow convincing people you are the official one. This needs a lot of clout: e.g. a sale by Sotherbys that is well known that people can trace back the NFT to. In a sense its like a digital antique when there are easy fakes.
My way of thinking is an NFT is a shitcoin with supply 1 and smallest denomination 1.
Walter Benjamin talked about this problem in 1935 [0]. It's particularly an issue with photography as an art form. For instance Jeff Wall's masters are all stored as RAW digital files and displayed as light boxes [1]. Theoretically he could produce an unlimited number of editions of each work, and theoretically anyone working at a record label who had received a copy of the hq file could do the same [2].
What prevents this and maintains the value of the work is that there are legal and social norms enforced through a vast network of institutions (galleries, museums, collectors, art fairs) that ensure that there will never be more than 1 actual edition of the work, or 2 or 3, whatever it is the number never changes after it is set, and minting more editions would be professional suicide, and the network of institutions would never allow or recognize it even if an artist tried it.
Lawrence Lessig's book Code developed the argument that any combination of social norms, legal structures/enforcement, and code or infrastructure can function as law, and sanction or foster certain behaviour and markets. "Code is law" was a clever observation and a bit of a revelation, but the NFT crowd seem to believe that it's enough or that it has more value than the social norms and contract law of the existing art world. It's engineering mindset hubris.
There's an attempt now to work social norms into the NFT space and enforce etiquette around "right-clicking", but convincing collectors of paintings that they could continue to collect photography was less of a challenge than convincing generations raised on BitTorrent, DRM wars, and authorless memes to introduce false scarcity into online digital abundance.
A NFT is just a digital receipt, and there's nothing that ties the receipt to the original creator or work except for a bit of text that the person creating the NFT has full control over. So they are effectively worthless for determining ownership, especially for copyright purposes.
The "non-fungible" part refers only to the receipt, not the original work.
Right but a receipt of what? A receipt, evidence, or proof, that a transaction took place. But a transaction of what? One party got money. What did the other party get? A proof that s/he paid the money. For what? For the proof that s/he paid the money ... for the proof that s/he paid the money for the proof that ... LOL.
Makes me think that I should make an NFT out of Brooklyn Bridge. That might gain lots of fame and thus lots of value?
In many cases you don't even need to modify it. Ownership of an NFT often does not provide copyright on the original image (https://www.wipo.int/wipo_magazine/en/2021/04/article_0007.h... has some interesting details on what you do and don't get with an NFT). So if you made the original image, you can just mint a new NFT of that image and sell it.
Heck you can mint as many NFTs as you like of any image you own the copyright of :)
So, if you don't own the copyright and then mint an NFT, in theory the copyright holder could get the source image for your NFT taken down (depending on where it's hosted of course)
That hasn't stopped loads of NFTs of copyrighted images being minted ofc.
This isn't any different than an artist offering a limited run of physical prints and then going back on their word. There's generally some level of trust between the buyer and the artist and if they break that trust then they hurt demand for their work. I've been following the NFT space for years and I haven't seen this issue crop up much at all.
I can understand that trust and reputation has something to do with it but I wonder with digital art it becomes a question of how much do I need to modify my copy of the original to make it a new piece of art.
And if NFT does not give you the copyright I might sell the copyright or license it to 3rd parties who could not care less about you having an NFT somehow "associated" with it.
I guess the key is what does it mean for an NFT to be "associated" with anything.
What prevents a musical artist from publishing a bunch of unoriginal filler after having a major hit? Is this really a serious threat to the concept of publishing music?
Copies of music recordings aren't typically sold under the pretense that they're unique. If your favorite artist produced a record and sold you a copy, guaranteeing that it the only copy that'll ever be made, you might be inclined to pay more for it. Let's say you buy it, because you believe this might be the only opportunity to own this music. If your favorite artist then proceeded to sell other records with the same music but with an additional 100 ms of silence at the end of each track, you'd feel tricked.
It's a terrible analogy from the start, don't blame me.
> Copies of music recordings aren't typically sold under the pretense that they're unique.
My point is that if you buy a new record from an artist you generally expect it to be original music that’s the product of creativity. But a lot of artists release things that are perceived by many to be very derivative, unoriginal, and not creative.
> My point is that if you buy a new record from an artist you generally expect it to be original music that’s the product of creativity.
No, you expect it to be one of hundreds to hundreds of thousands of exact copies that anyone else could buy regardless of whether you own a copy or not, and that will usually be repressed if the supply runs dry. It's the product of a record pressing/CD replication machine more than anything else; no creative or original work goes into producing copy 67,904 out of 100,000. There is no expectation that you are paying for original work. The money you spend might go into funding original work, indirectly, but what you're paying for is a copy, and that's also what you generally expect it to be.
If consumers generally each bought the only copy of the records they own, it might have been more relevant.
But again, this thread is about how different separate creative works from one artist are, not how many identical copies of a single work the artist releases.
There’s a limit to artists’ ability to do this. It’s called copyright law and it’s enforced by a central authority. Unfortunately no such central authority exists in the NFT space, so it’s perfectly within anyone’s rights and abilities to copy an artwork and sell it as their own.
When you say "sell an artwork" do you mean sell all rights to it or license its copying for personal use etc? Copyright and contract law still applies. But how does it apply to NFTs?
It doesn’t. Or it will some day, either way, this is the point. It’s still going to require a centralized authority to enforce fair use, ultimately making it no different than any other method of distributing art.
> What prevents me from creating new NFTs with the same or slightly modified underlying digital asset?
That one seems like a classic supply and demand thing. Make too many, sell none
Having said that, that does actually seem to be the business model in this wave. At least for the ones people are heavily pushing that get on on my radar. Maybe not hues but "accessories" (procedurally generated png layers, flattened)
> But because anybody else can sell anybody else very similar NFTs it looks like the supply is infinite.
People only want to pay for the NFT, because it is supposed to represent a desirable piece of art. The only person who has the moral authority to sell it is the artist. Anyone can create an NFT that "links" to some piece of art they found online, but if I am not the artist, why would anyone pay me for it?
Additionally of course, there are artists whose work is more desired, so they command a premium over other artists.
I can see a way it could make sense. The NFT contains text that declares what the buyer of it gets. For instance they get the right to use the digital art on their website. And maybe a right to sell that right to someone else if they stop using it on their website.
If I tried to create such an NFT from someone else's art that would be fraud if I don't own the copyright to that art.
Is that how it works in practice? Do NFTs (typically) include immutable text which clearly spells out what rights are transferred to the buyer of the NFT? And because the text of the NFT is in the blockchain which can not easily be forged, courts will accept that fact as evidence of a binding contract?
> Do NFTs (typically) include immutable text which clearly spells out what rights are transferred to the buyer of the NFT?
This can be included immutably on-chain. Mostly it is done off-chain, which is ok, because enforcement of any such license would happen off-chain and in courts anyway. Frequently, no license details are given at all, which may also be ok, because people who collect fine art aren't doing it for the use value ("I need a stock photo for my landing page"), they are doing it because they feel good about being an art collector. In that sense, very limited use-rights are actually required.
> In that sense, very limited use-rights are actually required
Specifically, what use rights does an NFT grant?
For photographs (and I have a small gallery of them collected over the years in art festivals and galleries), they're hanging on my wall... though I can't publicly display them (that's part of the copyright).
If I sell a print of a digital image (that I captured with a camera) and I sell a NFT of the same digital image, what are the differences in the use rights that the two buyers have?
If the digital image, hosted on a server that I maintain goes offline (I didn't pay my network solutions bill and someone else buys the domain), what does does the NFT retain rights to?
The NFT is just an entry in a ledger. What rights the buyer has to the intellectual property that is your photo is decided by your respective jurisdictions. In general, I would think this is largely up to you - i.e. only the rights you explicitly granted.
However, I believe in the US, there is no right to even download a copy of a file on the internet for purely personal reasons. I could see an NFT buyer successfully argue in court that this right is implied, even if not specified.
What happens if the file goes offline? I would think that this will not effect an existing license that you have previously granted. Of course, the buyer may struggle to make use of their license rights if they did not retain a copy of the image themselves.
> In general, I would think this is largely up to you - i.e. only the rights you explicitly granted.
Do you have any examples of an NFT that grant rights accompanied by TOS terms for minting the NFT that affirm that it is the original artist or someone who is authorized to do so who is creating it?
> However, I believe in the US, there is no right to even download a copy of a file on the internet for purely personal reasons.
There is de minimis which isn't so much a right but rather a "this is beneath the concern of the law".
As to the US aspect, every country that is a signatory of the Berne Convention ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention ) recognizes the minimum standard for protection which includes the right to to make replications or display to the public that is held as part of copyright.
For an NFT, would a baseball card be an acceptable comparison for what it represents in the real world? To that end, I would contend that the same thing happens to it when the player that it represents (there is no ownership conveyed in a baseball card beyond the card itself) leaves the game.
It's interesting to think NFTs as digital baseball cards. Both (can) have scarcity.
But baseball cards also have physicality. They are close to our world we can see them and turn them around. Physicality gives them desirable properties like easily carrying them around, no computer required. A physical thing is unique. Any sequence of bits on the other hand can always be copied.
The use cases are more than art. Art is a part of the equation, sure, and we see these... incredibly inflated prices being paid for art as insane. Digital art. That can be replicated. In which ownership of the NFT may/may not convey ownership of the artwork. Of course this sounds absolutely nuts, and people can be forgiven for believing it is absolutely nuts and that's all there is to it.
But consider a very successful real world use case: trading cards. As NFTs, these digital cards are limited by contract on their respective blockchain such that infinite copies cannot be printed - they are limited edition. Scraps of cardboard for this rookie or that player only have ever had value to people who collect them - now the same sort of thing exists in the digital realm, without the risk of losing the physical collection in a house fire. It's less the artwork that is valuable, but the NFT itself.
Another valid use case is Patreon-like support of artists (especially in the music industry). As it is now, tens of thousands of people contribute money monthly to their favorite artists via platforms like Patreon often in exchange for perks like early releases to tracks or works in progress. NFTs can represent the same sort of thing, except that at some point in the future these early released tracks - or really - the possession of a fact of support for a band during their career as an NFT - has value amongst other fans. In some cases possessing these things can become backstage passes to a band at a concert.
Much of the NFT space right now is a cash grab. That doesn't mean valid use cases won't emerge.
> Digital art. That can be replicated. In which ownership of the NFT may/may not convey ownership of the artwork. Of course this sounds absolutely nuts
So. Digital art can be replicated, and they may or may not convey ownership. And then you immediately turn around, replace "digital art" with "digital cards" and "perks" and pretend that this is now somehow different just because you're using NFTs for literally the same thing, but called a different name.
> That doesn't mean valid use cases won't emerge.
It means exactly that: valid use cases will not emerge because of what NFTs are.
You create a new signature signing a message saying you transferred this. The important bit here is some public immutable record. If this happened on Ethereum, and Ethereum ceased to exist, then your NFT would cease too. If you used say a archive.org snapshot then your NFT would live as long as archive.org servers are up.
I'm not one to ever defend NFTs, but this is not right. Suppose I bought an extremely trendy natural number k ∈ ℤ and I have a signature σ from its inventor that says "doomrobo owns k". Suppose in a year the trend has passed and I'd like to sell k. How do I transfer ownership to someone else? Clearly sending σ doesn't suffice, since σ is public. Do I need a new signature?
Ok different setup: σ is actually a signature from me and the inventor saying "the non-inventor pubkey that signed of this message is the owner of k". How do I transfer σ now? Do I send my signing secret key? Who makes sure I deleted my copy of the signing key?