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?
It's much easier to deal with programmatically, much more secure, eliminates redundancy and waste, and removes intermediaries.
An electronic signature is just a digital version of your handwritten signature. A cryptographically signed token tied to your identity is unforgeable in comparison.
Right now, you not only need PDF documents and electronic signatures, but you need to redundantly maintain systems to store that information and make it available to easily search on the internet. PDFs and images are not designed for that. Imagine that, instead of each county or state having to maintain their own systems of record, duplicating effort and data, they all use the same blockchain technology, allowing you to query them all the same way. You wouldn't even have to visit their website because the data would be available for anyone to retrieve and verify. That eliminates all the crappy websites and systems that we use, with all their differences.
Let me use examples from my own county of Greenville, SC. In order to obtain a copy of a "certified document", I have to pay $10 for a special PDF. Why? There shouldn't even be a need for a "copy". If there was one blockchain with all the data there, why would I even need a copy? I could just point to the original deed, and anyone who wanted to verify it could just look at it. If I lookup the information on my property, I get a crappy sideways scan of a PDF showing past/current owners. That is the result of using outdated technology. If I wanted a nice view of the information on record, they would have to do a separate data entry by reading the PDF and typing it into some database somewhere. Why? It could lead to typing mistakes or be out of sync with the actual record. If the record itself was digital from the beginning, there is no risk of this happening.
In order to transfer property, what do I do? I need to alter the deed by giving my signature, having two witnesses, and obtaining a court acknowledgement. Even to simply acknowledge that I have paid off my mortgage, I have to obtain a signature from a "authorized representative" and have one or more witnesses. What does that look like in a crypto world? Well I have the key that authorizes me to transfer my property token. If someone wants to buy my house, they could simply pay, and a smart contract would automatically transfer the deed to them once the funds were securely in my possession. No need for a court, or witnesses, or anything. The transfer would automatically be reflected in the public record. Some current systems warn that assessor records may not be updated for several months after a deed is recorded, although they say the web page is refreshed daily with information processed the day before. There's no need for that. It only happens because we have both physical and digital records that can be out of sync with one another.
If I pay off my mortgage, I could have the deed automatically updated and ownership transferred to me the minute the funds clear, which would take no longer than an hour or two to confirm. There's no need to involve any intermediaries or bank representatives. In a crypto world, you could even setup complex transfers in this way. For example, you could have multiple property owners for a single property, with all of their own keys required to sign off on a sale or it doesn't happen, and with the money automatically distributed according to a mutually agreed upon contract.
It's not just about records. You actually enable functionality like buying or selling once things like deeds are tokenized. The records also can't be "lost" if they are part of a public, immutable, distributed blockchain. If there were ever to be some kind of computer failure, you would setup a new computer and it could connect to the national blockchain (as long as even one computer is up and running) and restore everything. You get automatic backups for free.
I'm sure you've sold or bought things like cars before. It's always a bit tricky. Who wants to carry around thousands in cash, especially when dealing with a complete stranger? Then you have to have the title signed, which could be done incorrectly, and then you need to register your car. Afterwards the DMV will give you a temporary registration, and mail you the new title. All of that hassle could be eliminated. You could digitally buy the car, and then the title could be updated immediately. You don't need to worry about maintaining or protecting the title yourself.
We are looking at a whole new world when the technology gets there. Law firms will need programmers who specialize in digital contracts. It'll be interesting.
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.