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by nobankai 439 days ago
> but what matters is the provable artist signature.

This actually means nothing in a medium where you can create infinite perfect copies of something. If we had 100,000 identical replicas of Starry Night then there would be no value in a signed original. This is how digital art fundamentally works, your "ownership" persists insofar as people respect the authority of your notary.
1 comments
0xG 439 days ago
The notary can be a public, decentralized and distributed ledger like a Blockchain. The signature and signed copy then can be "scarce" like are signed posters right?
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nobankai 439 days ago
I cannot name a single moment in the history of my life where another person has asked me who "owns" a piece of digital art. I know people who asked about the author, but nobody cares about the owner.

Unless your ownership confers some sort of meaningful control over the piece, society will entirely ignore your rules and distribute the work however they want. It's not like you can take the case to court, anyways. You're role-playing on a extralegal asset, not a tallying stocks and bonds.

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0xG 439 days ago
So even though in the case of Blockchain the owner has control over the piece (signature), do you think that the disconnect between "signature" and the fungible digital work is too big or meta and we should rather reconsider how we think of art, scarcity and those old dynamics? In this case will the artist signature and chain of provenance and creator<>collector connection be useless?
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nobankai 439 days ago
Let's put it this way. You're a wealthy patron that sponsors an animated feature-length film you intend to put on the blockchain. You pay the animators, the film is made, and now the hash is on the blockchain.

Strictly speaking, your "ownership" is only of the hash. Unless you register the film as a copyright, the US won't recognize your ownership of the film. You cannot stop people from sharing or deriving the work without legal protection, the utility the blockchain provides in this instance is entirely cosmetic. NFTs aren't just unnecessary - they're useless without external guarantees. The "chain of provenance" for the cloud is a scam. All digital works can be copied infinitely for $0/copy, and the ultimate irony is that the only way to stop that outcome is from abandoning the blockchain and relying on a government to protect you.

You want to know where all the talented, educated and principled technologists were during the NFT boom? Far, far away from any form of blockchain.

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