Some four randos made an NFT platform that scraped up every song on Spotify (including music from big wigs like Disney, Nintendo, Marvel, and John Lennon) and turned it into an NFT without the original artists' permission, promising that buying the NFT will magically give a piece of the profits to the original creators
within 48hrs of news about this coming to light, entire PROs and distributors have gone bugfuck insane, have used their connections to stop the website being hosted on AWS, and are sending their lawyers in by parachute to sue the absolute living shit out of the people who tried to pull this scam off.
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this completely ravaged any possible positive NFT sentiment from musicians.
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the guys running that platform (who put their identities on the open on LinkedIn) responded with absolute out-of-touch posts on Twitter, acting like all of this is perfectly normal, they are getting carpet ratios.
https://mashable.com/article/hitpiece-nft-music
https://web.archive.org/web/20220202041329/https://mashable.com/article/hitpiece-nft-music
PS: you can repost this on KiA1 on Reddit I can read there but I won't post on Reddit.
Maybe someone can translate into boomer how verifying ownership of digital property matters outside of a specific walled garden. Or how digital goods can in any way be considered to be "unique".
Because the nature of digital content is that it can be infinitely and perfectly copied at effectively zero cost.
I could see the tech being useful as a sort of IP ownership verification system. In a way that's what's done with it now, except as far as I know there's no legal system recognized connection between IP and NFTs.
Say for example I take a photo of something interesting enough to sell, that's my IP. I sell it as an NFT. Really the only way I could make that actually possess the value of my IP is some sort of paper contract between myself and the NFT purchaser. At which point the NFT is still just a novelty, because the contract is the enforceable part.
Most don't even do that, it's just "hey we say this is unique art you own, but well you don't really own it, you just own this specific code we sold you."
A smart contract can be legally enforceable if well written just like a paper contract so in theory an NFT could have a legal copyright bound to it although I don't know if any actually do.
You could extend it to property, legal titles. The main difference between that and the paper titles we use now is that it would be simpler to transfer ownership, cheaper to store and manage, and much more tamper proof.
The challenge is mostly acceptance from people as legitimate. It would have to be adopted by the legal system.
Genuine question: How is this any different than PDF documents and electronic signatures?
Exactly this. NFTs only work as digital title, and only when there's some enforcement mechanism of that title.
For example, you could use NFTs with cars and boats and houses, but the government has no interest in handing over exclusivity of that role.
There are a whole bunch of categories of NFT types where there's physical goods, no physical goods, digital only etc, but all of these historically come with the actual legal rights to whatever the NFT represents.
The digital only goods went stupid, when people started selling computer generated pics of thousands of goofy things. There's no enforcement mechanism for your exclusivity. You bought the rights to the pic, but anyone else who wants the pic can literally copy it from your blockchain record and there's nothing you can do to stop them. And because there are now increasing more millions of these stupid pics being generated with the tiniest of variations, there's not even scarcity anymore.
Then came the next wave... people were already doing it, but CNN blew it up when headlines revealed they were selling lootboxes of NFTs of public domain images. The NFT can't include exclusive rights to the image because there are none. There's not even storage of the image on the blockchain. It's literally just a blockchain record that has a text link in it, and you own that record. Anyone can go download and share the pictures from anywhere. Hell, if the picture is still up at the link on your NFT, anyone can go there and legally grab the pic. It's just fucking stupid.
True, but it would be genius if it was adopted. Imagine handling payment through a digital contract. Both sides agree, and bam, money and title changes hands. There is nothing to dispute. As you said, it doesn't mean anything unless it is adopted by the legal system so that you have a third party enforcement mechanism.
It matters as much as ownership of any collectible matters, which is not at all except to the people doing the collecting. Try explaining how people pay money for unique skins/models in games. It's all digital and meaningless but it gives people joy somehow so they do it.
Not NFTs. Not Bitcoin either. They are protected and kept unique through cryptography and the blockchain (a distributed ledger). That is the innovation behind Bitcoin that makes it special. Prior to its creation, nobody knew how to prevent the double spend problem, which is basically me sending the same digital value to multiple people precisely because digital goods are easy to copy.
I put those people on the same mindset as gambling. Based on the many billions the gambling industry makes, it's not a small group either. I've never understood that type thing, like slot machines for example. I'm supposed to put money in this machine that is specifically designed to leave me with less money than I started with. No thanks.
I only played slot machines once. It just felt like the worlds shittiest arcade game.
Well, it's a fantastic tool to wash money or to hide it, if you sprinkle a bit of Ponzi's pyramid scheme behind it, it's even better.
My government isn't allowed to touch or tax money that is invested, so fuck em, I'm tired of financing the destruction of my own country.