[berberous]

Anti-crypto people on HN are always so black and white.

YouTube routinely deals with DMCA notices that are bogus, and it’s difficult for them to sort out whether someone is a legitimate rights holder or not.

With NFTs, it makes that a lot easier. If I have a fake BAYC, OpenSea can determine that very quickly and take it down, regardless of how many intermediate off-platform transactions there have been.

So just because there are still fakes and IP enforcement issues, doesn’t mean that having a verifiable and auditable decentralized chain of custody back to the original mint transaction is not very helpful.

[AlexandrB]

> If I have a fake BAYC, OpenSea can determine that very quickly and take it done, regardless of how many intermediate off-platform transactions there have been.

What qualifies as "fake"? How many modifications would I have to make to the original images for them to count as new art? Because this is a fundamental question in copyright law RE: derivative works and NFTs don't seem to help with this at all.

[berberous]

This is again a black and white answer.

There are many fraudsters who, quite literally, make fake NFT that look exactly the same. The decentralized chain of title is very useful to quickly and definitely distinguish the originals from the fakes.

Just because blockchain cannot solve all problems, does not mean it has not solved the above problem.

I agree that an artist could come along and make a derivative artwork that is right on the line of what is infringing, and in that case, you would solve it with traditional methods, e.g. an IP lawsuit for a judge to decide. Nobody said NFTs can solve all IP disputes.

But they can definitely determine the provenance of an item, even after a complex round of intermediate off-platform secondary transactions.

[BobbyJo]

This completely glosses over the fact that this only works for things on-chain. So you own an NFT, what does that actually mean? Does it mean you verifiably own the thing the NFT points to? No. It simply means you verifiably own the pointer. The link between the pointer and the off-chain thing is still completely vulnerable and unverifiable.

I think the real world equivalent is having a signed legal contract, but no courts or police. Feel free to buy and sell the contract, as I'm sure that has value as art in and of itself (which is how I see NFTs). But if you wish to lay claim to the items under contract, glhf.

[berberous]

I think this is a problem that’s easier to solve than you think.

Let’s say an artist creates a minting process, which contains a click through contract granting you legal rights to the image purchased, the right to make derivatives, etc., which rights transfer always to the holder of the NFT.

You now have a legal contract granting the NFT holder all IP license rights to that image. If there are 300 intermediate secondary transactions, and then I buy the NFT, make a derivative to exploit commercially, and get sued, my defense in court is simple: (1) here’s the governing IP license terms and (2) I own the NFT which is easily proved on chain. That IP license, by the way, could even be embedded on chain.

I can think of lots of examples like the above, where you can leverage some offchain system (like an IP license) with an on chain one, so that you have real world rights to an item but also benefit from easy and auditable transferability.

Again, just because NFTs do not solve all problems (eg you still need an IP license) does not mean that combining the two is not a real and useful improvement.

[BobbyJo]

> Again, just because NFTs do not solve all problems (eg you still need an IP license) does not mean that combining the two is not a real and useful improvement.

Totally agree. I think that's where the divide lies with tech savvy people and why HN tends to be anti-crypto. It is indeed a useful piece of a stack for solving a problem, but honestly it's a pretty minor piece. A majority of the cost and attention that goes into IP is enforcement, not contract tracing. It's definitely a part of the problem, especially for smaller players, but it's not the whole pie that the less tech savvy seem to think it is.

[Joeboy]

I'm not sure if I'm understanding you or not.

I can see that if there's an NFT minted in eg 2020 and no record of the associated work existing prior to that, that provides a bit of evidence in favour of the (earliest) NFT holder being the legitimate IP owner. Is that what you're saying, or something more than that?

[berberous]

That’s basically it.

For a well known and successful project, like BAYC or Cryptopunks, the authentic and original mint contracts are well known. If in 100 years someone offers to sell me one, which has traded hands 3500 times, it is extremely easy to ignore the noise of the 3500 intermediate transactions, pull up the source contract, and confirm it’s the authentic original.

This of course works best for “well known” NFTs, but it is a legitimate improvement over how Sotheby’s would have to authenticate a newly discovered alleged Monet, as in that case, the secondary transactions are relevant and need to be investigated as it’s impossible to just jump to the source and know with certainty that this is a legitimate Monet.

For projects that are not well known, you do not have the benefit of having a “well known” source contract, but yes, with everything on chain, you could at least do as you suggest and say, well, this appears to be the earliest example on chain anyone has been able to find.

So while there is of course still some uncertainties or some need to refer to external knowledge or sources off chain, being able to totally track a clear decentralized chain of title is very helpful, and solves a lot of problems, even though it does not solve all problems.

[Joeboy]

Thank you! My initial idea of what NFTs were was that they were like a free copyright registry, and as far as that goes, I don't really see a problem (although it seems like a rather over-engineered solution).

[TheDong]

> YouTube routinely deals with DMCA notices that are bogus, and it’s difficult for them to sort out whether someone is a legitimate rights holder or not.

This is very true, but I don't see how NFTs are a good solution to this.

The problem you're getting at is "determining if someone has permission from a copyright holder in a given work is hard" which is a true problem. NFTs do not currently give you copyright over a work, so they don't currently solve it.

In theory, we could have a copyright token, but that also can't work trivially. Why? Because copyright can, and of often is, written with complex conditions.

Let's say I'm a podcast, and I email a songwriter and ask them if I can use one of their pieces of music on my podcast, and then they ask what the podcast and content is, and then finally say "Yes, you have permission to use it for free on that specific episode you talked about" or "you can use the first 20 seconds of it" or such. How does that get captured as an NFT, where it's okay use it on a youtube video which is the audio of my podcast episode I got rights for, but it would be infringing to use it on a different video?

How would fair use be checked? Would lawyers act as oracles in any "NFT token use disputes"? Isn't that already the state of the art?

I guess in my head, "legal use of copyright" requires checking fair use, and requires checking arbitrarily complex legal conditions, so I don't see how you can make an "nft" of this without having a lawyer review or write every token... which scales just as well as having one lawyer at youtube hq watching every video.

For another fun challenge in copyright, how might your idea model copyleft / gpl / the linux kernel copyright issues, where someone uses GPL software (a conditional copyright license, conditioned on releasing their source code), but did not give the source code out after making changes and distributing binaries?

[i_am_proteus]

>OpenSea can determine that very quickly and take it down

How is this block chain different from open sea using a centralized ledger?

[berberous]

If everybody in the world agreed to only buy and sell digital art on OpenSea, then it is no different, assuming you trust OpenSea to operate fairly and to not lose records or make mistakes.

But practically, nobody has ever been able to convince the world to only buy and sell on one platform, and even if they could, that would be a worse solution because better platforms may emerge and it’s nice to have alternatives.

Stated another way, today, OpenSea could not possibly track all NFT transactions in a centralized database without just mirroring the data in the blockchain, as many transactions occur off platform.

[woodruffw]

I eagerly await MoMA's removal of Warhol's despicable fakery[1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_Soup_Cans

[quixoticaxolotl]

> having a verifiable and auditable decentralized chain of custody back to the original mint transaction

A verifiable and auditable centralized chain also works here if you trust the centralized party? I'm not seeing why decentralization is core to this premise.