[dschnurr]

The people receiving royalties are the artists in these cases – instead of the record companies, instagrams, and etsys of the world. I fail to see how this won't be a net positive for wealth equality when we're shifting the advantage to those who have historically been taken advantage of.

[klodolph]

> The people receiving royalties are the artists in these cases...

This is just factually incorrect. I don't know why there's so much confusion here... it's the creator of the NFT that controls where the money goes, not the creator of the artwork. I don't know why people think that it's the artist that gets the money--that doesn't make any logical sense--how would a system like that even work?

[dschnurr]

The creator is almost always the artist. Provenance is what gives NFTs their value. The value of a Beeple NFT minted by a random user is $0.

[geofft]

The value of a Beeple NFT minted by a random user is exactly what the market chooses to value it as.

If it's minted by an agency that helps creators do marketing, and the agency gets the creator to say "Yes, this is a legitimate NFT created on my behalf by this agency, which has been very helpful to me in understanding NFTs, I don't understand these fancy computer things," why would the value be zero?

(This exact scenario plays out all the time in the real world. People bought "Taylor Swift's" album Fearless, which was authorized by her and contained her actual voice and songwriting and paid profits to her and was in all senses legitimate, and paid well over zero dollars for it. And then over a decade later she tells her fans that she doesn't control it and she's recording her own version of the album actually owned by her.)

[AlexandrB]

What stops a record company from including a clause assigning any NFTs (and/or the revenue therefrom) created by the artist during the contract term to them?

[pmulard]

Nothing. Just like nothing stopped Taylor Swift from rerecording her entire library to license her music herself. If artists sign their NFT rights away, that's on them.

[btilly]

What Taylor Swift did is an imitation of what Prince did long before her.

See https://www.billboard.com/articles/news/cover-story/7348551/... for more.

[packetlost]

That's not really relevant to this discussion though

[NicoJuicy]

What stops someone from creating a nft with the same metadata?

[jjulius]

Absolutely nothing.

[btilly]

Provenance is what gives NFTs their value.

The question is how you prove that provenance if a niche artist has created an NFT on a niche piece of art. (And, honestly, most of the people who would want to create NFTs are going to be in this category.)

Now imagine an agency whose job was simply to create a digital signature on a work that indicated what they had done to prove a particular piece of art really was produced by the artist who then goes on to sign the NFT. If the agency has an established reputation, then that signed NFT has much more solidly established provenance than an unsigned NFT. Of course that agency has non-zero costs to establish provenance. And adds a non-zero amount to the value of the NFT.

What then, can said agency reasonably charge the artist for this service?

[echelon]

The value of a Beeple NFT minted by Beeple is $0. The market just hasn't discovered that yet.

An NFT has no more value than a JPG.

I'll longbets anyone that says otherwise.

[arcsincosin]

I agree but it's worth noting that Beeple was selling JPGs for $5000+ in the mid 2010s as a commissioned artist in the music industry. So the NFTs have also brought some transparency to a successful digital artist along with the crazy valuations.

[sashimi-houdini]

This seems like a dangerous bet to make... my take on the NFT "market" is that it's money laundering, wash trading (inflating prices to attract suckers to the market) and perhaps in a small part conspicuous consumption. Mostly fraudulent... but would you bet against a fraud?

[berberous]

I would take a broader bet that is not tied to Beeple (i.e. that NFTs of significant artists will have long-term value in a similar manner as a painting).

[echelon]

I would take that broader bet that NFTs will have zero long-term value.

[usehackernews]

Explain why -

Is this because you don't have interest in it, or do you have a true justification of this?

I'm willing to take this bet. Just like art, 99% can be bought for $1 at a garage sale, but there will be the 1% that has value to someone.

You are betting against the generation who spends massive amounts on video games costumes, and puts more value into their online image (instagram) than real life image, not finding value in a form of digital scarcity & status. I find that hard to believe.

[intotheabyss]

So the condition of your bet would be that all NFTs everywhere have zero long term value? So something like, by 2030, no non-fungible token will have a monetary value?

[saalweachter]

I'm not interested in taking the counter party in this bet, but if you were to take a bet in the form "The highest sale price of a NFT in calendar year 20X0 will be no more Y0% of the highest sale price of a postage stamp in that same year.", what would you fill in for X & Y?

[lottin]

You're god-damn right.

[rcxdude]

In most legitimate uses of NFTs the creator is the artist.

[klodolph]

How would you know if an NFT is legitimate? There's no "legitimate" bit on the NFT that distinguishes it.

If you wanted to support the artist, wouldn't it be faster, easier, cheaper, and more reliable to support them directly, through Patreon or something similar?

[crazygringo]

But the NFT is supporting them directly, if they minted it.

I personally think NFT's are silly, but there's zero argument to be made that they aren't supporting the artist. The artist minted them in the first place.

[klodolph]

> The artist minted them in the first place.

That's completely false. Anyone can mint an NFT. Artists have minted some of them, and other NFTs are created without the artists' permission.

I don't get why people are saying this when it's so obviously false, like, it does not pass the smell test for basic credibility.

[rcxdude]

Are pirate NFTs selling for a significant price? Clearly people are making them without permission, but are people buying them? The high-profile mega-money examples for sure are being minted by the artists.

[crazygringo]

Obviously the discussion is about NFT's the artists minted themselves.

Counterfeits isn't relevant to the discussion here. It's like complaining that tipping a server doesn't work because the cash might be counterfeit. It has nothing to do with the main point.

[pshc]

I guess the buck stops at Blue Checkmark providers really.

[rcxdude]

Generally when the artist endorses it. NFTs give you a token that represents a piece of art they made which you can move and resell independently, even if the artist is no longer around. I personally am not very likely to buy any, but I can see the appeal (it's much the same as owning the originals of any other bit of art as opposed to a copy). The current cost of creating and moving them around is unfortunate, however (and reflects the immaturity of crypto as a whole. I believe ethereum is working hard to improve their scaling with a plausible plan, so this should improve, but it is a definite problem at the moment)

[AlexandrB]

This is not a property of NFTs, but rather of new, unproven technologies. If NFTs "make it big", there will be plenty of middlemen that spring up to "help" artists sell NFTs while owning the IP rights and collecting royalties.

[dschnurr]

Sure there will be middlemen trying to profit due to asymmetry of information / technical knowledge. But as technology marches along the barriers to entry of launching new things trends to zero. Smart creators are increasingly harnessing new technologies to cut out existing middlemen. Podcasts are a great example of this, anyone with a microphone can start an entertainment business now and collect money from direct relationships with advertisers.

[AlexandrB]

I think the big news in Podcasts is centralization. Many new podcasts get their money either from "networks" or by being part of one of the podcast walled gardens (e.g. Spotify). I suspect traditional podcasts will go the way of blogs soon and be largely superseded by several competing commercial platforms (think Medium). See, for example, the moves by Apple to turn their Podcasts app into a subscription platform: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/04/apple-leads-the-next-...

[jjulius]

>Podcasts are a great example of this...

And yet plenty of middlemen exist for podcasts, too - Earwolf, Stitcher, yadda yadda. Sure, barriers to entry trend toward zero, but that doesn't mean everyone's going to see what you're selling. Many people will need to partner with someone who can help get their shit in front of people who want it, and those partners are going to want a cut.

Record labels, Instagrams and Etsys will show up to the NFT party in spades.

[billytetrud]

There's a difference between making royalties for distribution of copies of an item and making royalties for transferring a single item from one person to another. One makes sense, the other is a weird misleading way to rent to people.

[mattdesl]

Royalties apply on re-sale, not every transfer. Royalties on sales going back to the original creator is pretty normal practice in the arts and creative industries (music, writing, art, photography).

The good thing, compared to traditional markets, is that this is something that can be (loosely) enforced with smart contracts, the % rate is flexible, and the current NFT royalties are typically far better for the artists (eg: 10% NFT platform fee instead of 50% gallery fee).

[lottin]

What on earth are you talking about? If I buy a copyrighted work in the second-hand market I don't have to pay any royalties to the original creator. That would be extortion.

[mattdesl]

You are free to do the same (trade w/o fees) with crypto currencies, nothing stops you from sending the tokens directly from one wallet to another or doing a private sale.

But with galleries in the real world (where artists are “represented” - and the model that NFT marketplaces are emulating), the artist will receive royalties on sales.[1]

[1] - https://www.dacs.org.uk/for-artists/artists-resale-right/in-...

[crazygringo]

> the other is a weird misleading way to rent to people.

There's nothing weird or misleading about it, and it's got zero to do with renting.

It's simply like a real estate broker commission, gallery commission, or whatever.

The concept of a commission has existed for a long, long, long time.

[billytetrud]

> It's simply like a real estate broker commission, gallery commission, or whatever.

Except that its not at all like that. You pay a commission to someone who helped you sell something - they did work to help you sell it and you compensate them. Paying an automatic comission fee to the artist upon sale makes no sense. What are they doing to earn that commission? You already paid for their art. It makes no sense to pay again. What this is cannot be called a "comission".

I can see a situation where the artist is paid in total a very small fraction of the total price the art was sold for. Eg in the situation someone brought up where an artist sells a painting for $10,000 and then a few years later its sold for $1 million, I can see the artist maybe getting 10% of the margin between those sales (eg 0.1*(1 million - 10,000)). But even that is dubious to me, since a sale already took place. It just seems really weird to me and I think it has to be justified further than just "this is good for artists" or "artists need more money". Certainly calling it a commission is not at all accurate.

[crazygringo]

I get that you don't like it.

That still doesn't make it weird or misleading or "renting". It's straightforward and clear and ownership.

You're correct in that it's not exactly the same as previous models. It's a somewhat new innovation. And isn't it great to try new things?

Perhaps you'd prefer to think of it as more like a transaction tax, which exists in many localities when you sell real estate. E.g. NYC has a 1% transaction tax on sales over $1MM. But here the tax goes to the creator rather than the government.

[billytetrud]

Sure. Its an interesting new idea. I can see that it might have reasonable use cases, but its not clear to me whether its actually an improvement over other kinds of contracts. It would also have technical problems in the case of key change - if the owner has their keys compromised and needs to transfer the record to a new address, do they pay a fee to the original creator for that? And this happens in perpetuity?

[mattbeckman]

Transfers are not necessarily sales.

Transaction fees for the Topps MLB cards on WAX, for example, are only taken during the sale when the sale occurs on a secondary Atomic Asset marketplace. There are no royalties to trade or transfer between accounts.

[lottin]

These are not royalties. Royalties are paid when you buy a copy of a copyrighted work. And your not paying royalties again if the previous owner has already paid them.