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I quite enjoyed supporting artists like Ame72 and Sabat by purchasing their digital artwork. 🤷♀️
I don't see how it's much different than Patreon. You pay creators that you enjoy, you get a digital collectable, and access to discord of you care about that sort of thing. NFTs allowed many people to do art full-time.
You didnd't purchase their artwork though. The fact that you still haven't figured that out says a lot about what kind of customerbase was needed to get NFTs off the ground.
So if somebody buys my digital photos off Deviant art, they didn't "purchase my photos"? Geez, I better go call that TV studio that used some of my work and let them know they got scammed.
When I hired a wedding photographer 15 years ago and got the digitals, did I get scammed?
Are you against people buying anything digital or just the underlying technological platform?
It's having a legal contract that passes the intellectual property to your name and a Legal System backing that contract with the power and willingness to enable the use of Force to confiscate the property of contract breakers, that give you de facto ownership rights.
That's the essential difference between your example and NFTs.
Thinking that a mere "ownership certificate" which is not legally recognized is "ownership" is just a variant of the Sovereign Citizen delusions only with "magical" bytes instead of "magical" words - techno-magical mumbu jumbo for people who can't understand that symbols not backed by enforcement structures mean nothing in a society.
An "ownership stamp", no matter how technically advanced, which is not recognized or backed by a Legal System gives you de facto no ownership rights because nothing will back you up when others disregard your claims of ownership asserted by that "ownership stamp" and if you yourself try to enforce it that Legal System will likely turn against you depending on how you try and enforce yourself your ownership claims (for example if you do something legally deemed Theft or Assault it's you who ends up in facing the might of the Legal System).
That's the essence of the complete total idiocy of thinking NFTs are ownership: ownership is not merely having a "certificate of ownership", it's there being societal structures that recognize your ownership and will back you up when you want to assert ownership rights. In fact, most ownership does not require any certificates, digital or otherwise, just an entry in a database of the appropriate Legal Registrar of ownership.
As I said, thinking it's some made up certificate of ownership that gives you ownership rights is Sovereign Citizen "logic"
bruh it's really not that difficult. Fan sends money to artist. Fan receives some magical bytes in return. Could fan have right clicked and downloaded the artwork without paying? Of course. But fan wants to support artist. Because fan likes artist's art. It's how any digital "marketplace" works, NFT or not. All this "legal system" and "ownership" and "legal registrar" nonsense you're pulling up is completely irrelevant. You're reading too much into it.
"Bruh", your problem is exactly that in your mind it's all simple even though you live in a Society right next to millions of people and you somehow think that what you believe because you read it on a website gives you "rights" that those millions of people will respect just because you say so.
It's like thinking that a toilet needs not be connected to a sewage line to handle your shit or the electricity for your house appears by merelly having power lines rather than coming via them from where it gets generated via a complex infrastruture to get it to you.
It's the Soverign Citizen kind of take on the world, and the results are pretty much the same for techno-deluded kind of Soverign Citizen as for the document-deluded ones: nobody else respects your claims to having certain rights hence the only worth you can extract from such "certificates" is from finding and swindling even greater fools to sell those "certificates" to.
You're putting words in my mouth. I didn't say shit about "rights" and "respect". The guy in the original comment mentioned nothing about it either. You said that. You're bringing this idea into the conversation and then arguing against yourself. Seriously, what is your endgame here?
I genuinely have no clue what you think I "read on a website" about NFTs. To set the record straight, my understanding of NFTs is that you have a ledger where your public key is associated with a
tokenshort string of characters, and every computer participating in the ledger agrees on that. that's it. All of these ideas of "ownership" and "rights" and societal analogies is bullshit you brought into the conversation.Seriously, what is your endgame here?
They just really really really hate NFTs/crypto for some reason. I can't imagine ever getting so worked up about a technology like people do today about crypto. I want to support an artist so apparently I need to have a PhD in contract and IP law in order to do so.
As per another poster higher up this thread:
You didnd’t purchase their artwork though. The fact that you still haven’t figured that out says a lot about what kind of customerbase was needed to get NFTs off the ground.
You seem to have chosen a very specific, very "curious" cutoff point for contextual relevance of responses not alligned with your opinion in this thread in order to claim my response to you is some wild unrelated "bullshit".
Further, you responded to my comment criticising NFTs as a means of guaranteing ownership, with an example usage that has nothing to do with ownership and were NFTs do literally nothing useful at all (you can just send the money to the artist if indeed your objective is to "contribute to the artist" no NFTs required), so per your own logic your post is bullshit you brought into the conversation.
Your example provides no support for the idea being discussed by everybody else in this thread, so either that post of yours is bullshit you brought into the conversation (since it goes out on a tangent and doesn't support the points I was replying to or made in my comment) or you wanted to support the idea that NFTs are useful and failed miserably and now are just criticizing me for following you down your irrelevant tangent to the points being discussed in the thread.
Seriously, what is your endgame here?
you can just send the money to the artist if indeed your objective is to “contribute to the artist” no NFTs required
Yeah, people could donate directly, but some people decided to buy NFTs instead, and they wouldn't have spent the money otherwise.
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This is my logic which shows that my post is not bullshit. My post is only bullshit by the "logic" that you try to introduce.And you don't need to be writing these long-winded paragraphs. The point stands that you're the one who brought up the argument about NFTs as means of ownership and then started arguing on the opposing side. Who are you arguing against? There is no-one on the proposing side, only the starmen you put there.
Yeah, people could donate directly, but some people decided to buy NFTs instead, and they wouldn’t have spent the money otherwise.
These arguments always make me smirk. Yes, of course I could use the slow, expensive, and exploitative financial rails that currently exist. But it's fucking fun to buy NFTs. And easy. It's as simple as that. I enjoy collecting these art pieces. I don't give a flying fuck of a shit if it's not actually "owning" it by some armchair lawyer's abstract definition of "owning". I support cool creators, the image appears in my wallet, I get perks associated with the token sometimes, and I have some prints of the art on my wall. I don't care, like, not even a little bit, if I actually "own" it or not from a legal contract point of view, which is just a social layer anyways. I verifiably possess it, and that's enough me.
Your argument was that my post didn't follow yours hence was "bullshit", yet your own post didn't follow mine and hence was by that very logic "bullshit".
Further and interestingly you ignored the quote I provided in the last post from somebody else up the thread, that disproves your own assertion that "you’re the one who brought up the argument about NFTs as means of ownership" - somebody else already brought it up and I was following it and kept doing it even when you came up with and unrelated anectdote.
That said, somebody else earlier on mentioned supporting artists in this thread.
So we both "jumped" over the other post and just followed on with some previous point from somebody else.
Either we're both making "bullshit" posts (per that "logic" of yours) or we're just cross talking and going along unrelated argument lines (which, frankly, having looked back to check the rest of the thread, we're not the only ones).
It’s having a legal contract that passes the intellectual property to your name and a Legal System backing that contract with the power and willingness to enable the use of Force to confiscate the property of contract breakers, that give you de facto ownership rights.
Here's an excerpt of the "Holder Rights" explicitly outlined from a very very very large and well known music artist who released music NFTs:
"[Redacted] token holders have full commercial rights to their unique version. They can remix and release it, play it publicly, or use it in other content like videos."
"[Redacted] includes the ability to render full quality audio files and to render individual tracks as Stems to make edits and remixes easy."
"Holders do not have exclusive rights, meaning they cannot remove their version from [redacted] or stop it from showing up in NFT marketplaces like OpenSea."
"If you do use a version commercially, you should not sell the token. If you do, you will transfer the rights and may need to obtain permission from the new owner to coninue your use."
"Every buyer will be responsible for their own copyright claims."
Do you think this would hold up in a court of law?
That's pretty much a standard non-exclusive commercial licensing contract, same as you get from places that license musice for commercial use like Envato - it makes that token a tranferable license for that work with the licensing rights defined there and no more than that, and legally gives you no ownership (i.e. the copyright being yours) of those works.
Per those terms the copyright owner (which is not the person who has ownership of the token, as per those terms that only gives them a commercial license to use that work) can license it to other people under whatever terms they want.
Oh, and all of that is backed by Copyright laws, not by whatever technical solution was used for the NFT - they could've just as easilly used a seashell or a piece of paper as ownership "token".
If you bought an NFT which is a token for this work as per these contract terms, thinking you own the music, you've been had and should've had a lawyer check it out first.
So your chief complaint is mainly a semantical one related to the terms outlined, and not the underlying platform. Got it. Thanks for the responses. ☺️
You did not make the case that NFTs add value over a standard non-exclusive commercial licensing contract with your example and instead showed us an NFTs which even when actually backed by a contract does not provide "ownership", thus confirming my point and that of previous posters that NFTs by themselves don't given ownership.
Beyond that, if you think legally defined intellectual contract language elements like "ownership" and "licensing" are just semantics, you're going to be sorelly dissapointed when trying to assert your ownership of those assets.
I think we need to define "ownership" here if you're going to argue semantics and then try to pretzel-logic your way into disproving NFTs (or whatever your goal is)
ownership = rights (human law, rulings/opinions, enforced top down. i.e. titles)
possession = control (physics laws, math, enforced bottom up i.e. car keys)
One is disputable (who owns this dollar bill lying on the street?) but the other is not (indisuptable who has it in his pocket). One is reversible by ruling of a governing body, the other is not (lost cash has to be willingly given back, or taken by force). Sounds familiar...
You usually posses what you own and that's why these words are often interchanged. But sometimes this is mutually exclusive (You own a car but do not possess it - ex: impounded, keys withheld...)
crypto IMHO was never about the former. "Ownership" will always live in the layer of social agreement. What crypto gives is “possession”: control above the TOS and paper rights that web 2 gave us. The first time the user can possess the keys to his stuff on a database that's shared with other people (and not just the illusion of). This distinction is the reason why eventhough you do "own" your digital song/videos/game loot on amazon or PS5 via their TOS, you cannot trade it, swap it with a friend, resell it.... The key never left your digital landlord, they just let you in to play. You had the papers for your car, but not the key. You never possessed what you owned.
I think what most people call "ownership" when they buy an NFT is actually possession, not the legalese of "owning" something dictated by contracts and social aggreements.
Why does this matter? There's clearly advantages to 'possessing' something via an NFT:
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easy access to markets to buy and sell
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access to liquidity (have you ever tried selling a piece of art in meatspace?)
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real time list of all 'possessors' by the artist; Sabet can see in real time everybody who has bought or traded his art work, and give unique benefits (discord access, ticket drops, additional arty drops, etc) to those holders). this is not possible with traditional art. I cannot see the provenance of my photography pieces, for example
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democratizes art buying. I no longer need to go to an art show or bid at an auction. I just need to go to OpenSea
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uniquely provable possession (concert tickets, passes, etc)
First, apologies for the wall of text. I did try to make it short, but it's a multi-step complex subject.
What you wrote about possession and ownership makes sense in the physical world, were there can be only be one person who has possession of something - I give you the seashell I have in my possession and it's now in your possession and not in my possession anymore.
In the digital world, on the other hand, there can be infinite people in possession of exactly the same works because it can be copied at no cost.
This is why we end up with the headfuck which is Copyright Legislation and terms like "ownership" and "licensing" having very specifical legal meanings: whilst possession in the physical domain is unique and stupidly simple to determine (though, as you correctly pointed out, less so "ownership"), in the non-physical domain if you want to preserve that unique possession (or at least limit the number of people having possession) you end up with the anti-natura construct which is Intelectual Property Legislation.
Now, NFTs are a two step mechanism for asserting possession - they're not the asset itself but rather a token which itself is possessed and whose possession gives rights over an underlying asset.
The problem of unique possession of the NFT itself is techically solved by NFTs. However NFTs have no mechanism whatsoever to enforce any rights on the underlying asset - that part is delegated to other, non-technical mechanisms, which for underlying assets which are non-physical goods, invariably means Copyright Legislation and Contract Law as those are the only ways to control rights over infinitelly-copiable things (well, there's DRM, but NFTs don't do that).
As you pointed out NFTs, as a standardized token representing possession, deliver various practical benefits, which I would say are similar to those that Stocks deliver as tokens representing part-ownership of a business.
However:
- For Stocks there are a lot of legally mandated business ownership rights linked to Companies Limited By Shares (or whatever is the local legal name were you live for those companies were ownership is determined by owning shares of the company) which define most of the rights that possession of Stocks give (with even tighter rules for market traded companies)
- For NFTs there are no guaranteed legal rights on the underlying asset associated with having them: the rights on the underlying asset of an owner of an NFT start and stop with what's in the Contract and those contracts aren't even standardized.
The problem is that all together the NFT architecture is not standardized because that second link of the chain - the Contract linking the NFT to the underlying non-physical asset - is non-standardized hence you don't really know what you get if you buy a random NFT without reading the Contract for that specific NFT.
None of this is a problem if all you want is a cheap license to use a copyrighted work and in the process help the artist by paying them directly without paying middlemen (which seems to be your use case).
This is a problem for those who think they can just buy an NFT as a reselable investment asset, since the real value of an NFT is down to the nitty gritty details of the Contract associated with that NFT and whether one can actually enforce that Contract. It's this part that anchors all the scams around NFTs.
That said, the idea of using NFTs as a technological base for markets to make it simple and easy for consumers to buy works such as music directly from artists in a world were there is Copyright Legislation has merit, it's just as an investment that NFTs are problematic.
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yeah exactly I still haven't heard a single explanation of what makes NFTs a "scam". People just shout that word and expect you to accept it. Seriously, which part of a consensual transaction between two well-informed parties qualifies as a "scam"?
There is undoubtedly a huge number of rugpulls, vaporware, empty promises, and outright scams with NFTs. But this is true of any nascent technology, any sort of project like this. The reason so many people know about it and are aware about it is because of the permissionless and open nature of crypto which allows people to see these projects in realtime.
IMO it's neither good nor bad. It's just nascent tech. For an artist like Sabet, it's obviously good! It gets people exposed to his art, with a low entry barrier, and allows people to support him. For people like Trump, it's pretty clearly bad, and it just allows him to scam/rugpull people easier and faster.