Most people don’t understands existing IP laws (see what results you get when searching YouTube for “no copyright intended”); adding a new one isn’t likely to improve the situation, so I don’t accept that there is (nor that there is likely to be) a real social consensus in favour of NFTs.
"Because copyright ownership still has to be enforced through the traditional IP and legal system."
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't it even worse. There is no transfer of any rights whatsoever on the common trading platforms so I assume copyright ownership is rare. Consequently in most cases there probably is nothing to be enforced. At least that is how I understand NFTs.
The problem with copyright is that it's enforced by governments — who have monopoly on the use of force. NFTs are not enforced by governments, so they're just this funny cringy thing some people engage in, and that some other people, like me, make fun of.
The issue is that you’d have to figure out who has the right to create a NFT. The NFT solves none of the problems, rights attribution, and it creates a bunch of places for grifters and scam artists to make money doing nothing. It’s worse than our current solution.
If there is an 'authority' then the whole point of NFT's essentially crashes.
The authority can 'buy and sell' any kinds of 'rights' it pleases, today. We don't need NFT's for that.
The whole point of NFT's is that they are inherently distributed.
It's possible to create an NFT such that the NFT owner legitimately has certain rights, but that's another level of complexity, the rights may be different in any given scenario. Even if it were standardized, it becomes a management problem, for example, if the asset is licences out to other content creators, then the NFT becomes tantamount to owning a small IP business. Again there's not much value in the NFT at that point.
This is a point I've been making for awhile: the NFTs don't give you freedom from normal copyright law. And any infringements of the NFT contract would have be defended in the courts, using the normal legal process. But that normal legal process is also available to anyone holding intellectual property, even if they are not using NFTs. Therefore, there is no point to NFTs: they don't offer a way to escape the normal legal process.
But... thinking further about it, it doesn't even hold much.
NFTs may only be enforceable because of public law which lays out the playground for IP contracts and licenses (the same way the GPL/copyleft needs copyright law to be operational).
I think that the (biggest) problem with NFTs is that they grant no rights that are recognized by the governments of the world - the people who can help enforce your ownership.
Worse, they require no rights to create. You don't have to be a copyright holder to create an NFT, you just need a URI.
Your ownership of an NFT implies nothing about your ownership of the referenced object in real life (physical or digital).
This thread isn't about NFTs being an improvement over all copyrighted work, this thread is about NFTs being an improvement over other NFTs.
On the consumer side I wasn't suggesting anything, I said what they have to do in response to an already existing market with already existing transactions. This isn't about some future reality we imagine on an internet forum, this is about one you are simply not in.
If you think checking is too hard, then make a service that makes it easier to check and charge people for it, how often do you rule out business models that you personally identify, because thats what the market is saying to do.
You guys are approaching this from the wrong direction: you've taken NFTs and decided they are valuable, and set about trying to prove you can do useful things with them.
All of the things you've mentioned already exist, with a lot less effort. Copyright law is well established on digital goods. Contract/IP law is well established.
If NFTs have utility, beyond greater fool theory, then surely it will exist beyond having to go replicate all of these web2/tradfi/whatever concepts. Otherwise, what's the point?
Yeah. NFTs are not a bad idea but the current implementation is basically a scam. Ownership of these tokens means nothing, people pay for them and still own nothing.
They could be good. Imagine if instead of the current licensing hell you could just buy an NFT that represents your ownership of a song, a film, a video game. Companies wouldn't be able to take it away from you remotely, you'd be able to resell it at a later date. Such a thing could actually make copyright more tolerable. Unfortunately this would probably require an actual legal framework around it to guarantee these rights.
For a lot of stuff that's really not a hard problem. You just create the NFT of the hash before publicly releasing the item, it's only for stuff that exists out there in the world already that's a problem. Doesn't mean it's not a good way to resolve stuff going forward. Biggest problem with NFTs are how they integrate with the existing legal frameworks of copyright, etc.
nfts are just as bad as copyrights. both require unnatural systems in order to exist. both attempt to reduce freedom of speech and the proliferation of ideas. both need to be removed.
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