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by jarofgreen 1936 days ago
Q: What's to stop me taking sometime else's art I find online, claiming it's mine, turning it into a NFT and making money from it?

A: Absolutely nothing ... I think?

2 comments

This guy made a few hundred thousand by doing just that.

https://mobile.twitter.com/muratpak/status/13585748601721569...

Every generation gets the million dollar homepage it deserves https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Million_Dollar_Homepage
Oh man, it's even structured like a penny auction where the majority tile holder 'owns' the "final creation".

I'm willing to grant that it's slightly slightly interesting to consider what some works would look like if they were chopped to pieces and reconstituted from only the pieces people would individually bid on. There's an artistic statement in there somewhere.

But the pomp and slime that this is presented with completely obscure that.

But is that substantially different from this?

https://www.christies.com/lot/lot-andy-warhol-colored-mona-l...

Or artists like Richard Prince. Prince has been sued several times and made several settlements.

But - his court victories depended on the argument that he actually transformed the works he copied. If someone just claims ownership of a art work on a blockchain, I'm not sure that's the same thing.

Jesus Christ...
In my project, we use robust near-duplicate image detection based on image fingerprints that are generated from deep learning models. So if an image has already been registered on our system, no one else can register it.
Do you have a system in place for an artist to say “hey some asshole registered my art before I even heard of your project, no seriously, here is a screen grab of it in the editor/a closeup of the canvas/some other snippet of the Original File”?
If a "behind the scenes" screenshot outweighs an NFT in terms of proving authenticity, then why are we making NFTs in the first place?
Yes there will be a decentralized mechanism for posting essentially a “petition for relief” where they can lay out their case, but it will be optional and at the discretion of the operators of the “masternodes” in the system whether to grant relief. If the petitioner can attract enough votes then it would nullify the original registration. Anyone can operate a masternode but it requires locking up a lot of the coin to prevent Sybil attacks.
Ah, so basically if someone starts selling my art and I can get enough social media traction then maybe I can get them in trouble? Awesome, sounds like a great time for someone who's spent all their time getting good at art instead of getting good at publicity.

And half the NFT art markets require you to not post stuff you've tokenized elsewhere, so much for hacking up a multi-tokenizer that claims my work on every market as a way to avoid thievery. Unless there is a cross-market standard for claiming An Art.

That doesn’t seem to be a very confidence inspiring answer to deal with fraud.
It's a difficult issue to handle in decentralized systems, especially in a way that scales with growth in the network. Any mechanism that is not voluntary/optional but which requires some human judgment would necessarily introduce centralization and various attack vectors to undermine the system, such as people filing thousands of fake petitions as a kind of DDOS attack.
And is there many cases of that happening yet? "There will be" worries me.
No, we are not live yet, we are still developing the system and focusing on getting the basic functionality working 100%. But the mechanism I described would be fairly easy to implement.