This is perhaps my confusion around the whole NFT thing. How is it in /any/ way different than a boiler plate contract around "ownership".
I.e. when my photographer took photos at my wedding I signed a contract that I "own" those photos and all those rights. I can move then, alter them, back them up, sell them to getty, or whatever.
If I draw a piece of art, even digitally I own the copyright. I sell it to someone and now they own it and inherit all those rights...
Is NFT just simply creating a "Block Chain" for this? and if so... is it even needed? What value do I gain from using a NFT over you know a signed PDF that would actually be backed up in court if it came to it?
Is the vision that there is some hot market place for art and other assets that are traded so frequently that we need a live 24/7 market and exchange for them?
A signed PDF can be copied, but an NFT can not. That's what makes them useful. They allow you to sell digital things with the same freedom, securities and limitations you would get with physical items (i.e. First-sale doctrine). The NFT represents a digitized form of "ownership".
Where things get a bit complicated is that the NFT just grants you ownership of the NFT itself and nothing else. The interpretation of what the NFT represents happens completely outside of the system.
The NFT is thus not a replacement for a contract, but a way to move that contract into a digital marketplace.
For a practical example, take the difference between DVDs and buying a streaming movie on Amazon. If Amazon would sell digital movies in the form of NFTs, people could buy them. If they want to watch the movie, they show Amazon that they have ownership of the NFT and Amazon lets them stream it. When they are bored with it, they can sell the NFT to somebody else and then the new owner can show that NFT to Amazon to proof ownership and watch a stream of it.
Now in reality, this isn't how NFTs are used (yet?). The way NFTs are used right now is really more like trading-cards. Little novelty things that people might see value in, pay for to support the creator or just do money laundering with or whatever. Most NFTs do not give you access to anything, as whatever they are associated with is already in the public anyway.
The NFT does not represent copyright or ownership of the item it points to, but it has the technical capabilities to do so when the right legal paper work is attached to the NFT.
Why would Amazon (or any producer/distributor of digital content) want to facilitate second-hand sales of a product they otherwise control the sale and distribution of? How does this benefit Amazon more than controlling access to the content?
First Sale doctrine or similar laws exist in many countries, so they are required to allow used sales (e.g. https://www.hallgrimgames.com/blog/2019/9/22/eu-steam-resale). NFTs provide a means to make that practical beyond the boundaries of a single store front. So far these laws have never been enforced in the digital world however, partly because it has never been practical.
Another reason would be that game developers and movie studies start to sell media on their own. So the store would just be a service to download your games from, not the only source of your games. If all the stores stop carrying the media and the studio went out of business, archive.org or similar could take over, as the NFT proofs ownership and you don't have to wait 90 years until copyright expires. Right now we have the situation that some games are already impossible to get legally, as no store caries them and used sales of digital goods are impossible.
Finally, it wouldn't be Amazon starting this, they already have their market dominance and no need to improve the service, it would be the newly arriving competition that would start doing this. Amazon would then have to follow suit to not fall behind. Somebody like Epic might be big enough to get this going and they don't seem to be fundamentally opposed to NFTs.
This is of course all just wishful thinking, but we really need a better way deal with copyright in the digital world. Having media just get lost for 90 years due to there being no way to buy used really isn't acceptable.
I'm guessing the logic would be that the Movie Producer would sell the NFT's that you could "redeem/use" at specific cloud vendors and the vendor charges the studio for bandwidth etc.
I still don't really understand the logic of all of that, but I understand how it on paper would work. It'd kinda be like when you get a coupon for a free object from the store. Store fulfills the order and sends cost up to manufacture.
Yeah because no one has established that "having and NFT" really gives you anything. Have there been any cases yet about ownership? Keeping the URI alive? What happens when the originator of the NFT who provides access dies/dissipates as a corporation? Sure you can make any contract but is it enforceable or will the judge laugh at you for buying a poop icon and "dismissed"
> Is the vision that there is some hot market place for art and other assets that are traded so frequently that we need a live 24/7 market and exchange for them?
Sort of. You can and people have sold digital art (note this is not the same as owning the copyright) with contracts before, but NFTs make it accessible in a way that inspired a much larger group of people to participate (and yes, speculate).
It's been my understanding that the blockchain is precisely an experiment in what can be accomplished without laws and enforcement, albeit on top of a mountain of conventional infrastructure. Arbitraging energy prices, and laundering money, are only two possible uses. NFT's are another. A decentralized patent system without enforcement was previously something we could only imagine, but now we can try it out.
Isn't the whole point of a patent system the enforcement part? If you don't care about enforcement, you can just publish ideas to your personal blog or arxiv or whatever.
That would have been my guess too, but it doesn't preclude the experiment. I personally think there's more to it than pure enforcement. Coherent standards for what counts as an invention, and a well defined expiry term, are two things that attracted adherence to the patent system. Without them, patents would be too much of a mess to enforce. Those things have evolved over time within the existing patent system, and depend on not only statute but also case law. I don't see how anything like that can build up independent of having a robust government operating over the long term.
On the other hand we already have "copyright without enforcement" for recorded music, via file sharing.
Don Lancaster, who doesn't think much of patents, recommended when you have an idea, publish it immediately. That puts it in the "prior art" and makes it harder to enforce a patent covering the concepts.
Indeed, "defensive publication" can be a viable IP strategy when you're working in a quickly evolving space. Another is a provisional patent application which is much cheaper than a full blown application.
It's still worth at least chatting with a patent lawyer (which I'm not) to make sure what you think is sufficient as a defensive publication, actually is.
> It's been my understanding that the blockchain is precisely an experiment in what can be accomplished without laws and enforcement
Some people seem to think that, perhaps misled by words like "trustless" that are applied very narrowly to blockchain technology.
But the reality is there's almost nothing about blockchain that helps with these trust issues. If I order a physical product and pay in advance with crypto, I have no recourse except a legal one if the seller doesn't deliver. You can set up escrow systems but then you need to trust the escrow provider, and you still need to somehow deal with hard to verify claims like "I didn't receive my package."
That's just one example. In almost every area in which blockchain is "an experiment in what can be accomplished without laws and enforcement," you'll find the actual situation is that it's a learning exercise for those who don't understand why laws and enforcement are needed - or, a way to avoid laws and enforcement for those engaging in illegal activities.
> A decentralized patent system without enforcement was previously something we could only imagine, but now we can try it out.
How? Put your invention on a blockchain and anyone can copy it without consequence. The primary purpose of patents is lost without enforcement.
We banned insurance companies from making decisions on genetic information long before any actually tried it. No one had to make a personal nuclear weapon for us to make it illegal. Plenty of examples of how this isn't true in society.
A significant potential and likely harm is enough to consider preemptively regulating.
You're thinking of regulations. In basically every manifestation the primary function of the state is the enforcement of basic property law. If you don't have that you have warlords/oligarchs fighting with each other constantly over who owns what (since they each individually must act as enforcer).
As far as enforcement of property right, the "distributed" model is well understood and typically leads to a much worse situations than the centralized version.
That only works for things that don't depend on a legal framework to be useful.
Some of these blockchain applications are essentially proofs of concept waiting for a legal framework to support them. But until that framework exists, it doesn't make much sense to use the applications for anything that involves real value.
I.e. when my photographer took photos at my wedding I signed a contract that I "own" those photos and all those rights. I can move then, alter them, back them up, sell them to getty, or whatever.
If I draw a piece of art, even digitally I own the copyright. I sell it to someone and now they own it and inherit all those rights...
Is NFT just simply creating a "Block Chain" for this? and if so... is it even needed? What value do I gain from using a NFT over you know a signed PDF that would actually be backed up in court if it came to it?
Is the vision that there is some hot market place for art and other assets that are traded so frequently that we need a live 24/7 market and exchange for them?