Its a good idea to handle ownership of finite digital assets. Imagine buying a song or video game online, and then being able to sell it or give it to a friend later, without having to go through a central authority (and not be breaking copyright law). Just like with a CD.
Unfortunately, 99% of NFT projects have been essentially penny stock schemes, so now that's what everyone thinks of them as.
That's a nice oxymoron you have there. Digital assets are not "finite" or scarce, that's their biggest strength: that they can be copied and shared infinitely. I know that some people hate that, and would love to change it (see DRM). But to hell with that.
That's not true at all. Any deed of ownership can be finite, especially if they refer to a physical object where there is a natural limit on the number of owners. Just because you can make infinite copies of the document, doesn't mean the legal system allows you to do that.
And there we end up relying on a legal system again to verify the asset and we're back to square one. If my NFT needs to be verified when I sell it, which it will, because there will be fakes, then we still need a third party.
But why cram a finite-based system into a non-finite universe ? What's the point ? Haven't we understood that private property and ownership are not, in fact, better than sharing and common usage ? The digital world allows us to actually touch this, and we still import artificial restrictions that only benefit those who already have ?
You talk about consumers who buy a usage-license. But someone must create those content first, and holds the ownership on them. Which is usually the creator, or publisher, or someone who bought the ownership. And there are usually proof of this ownership, like contracts and such.
Even if ownership of digital assets or false scarcity were good ideas, NFTs never did any of this.
The spec was technically amateurish — basically just URLs in a bit of JSON in a slow database, with barely any connection to the asset. NFTs allowed regular non-IPFS URLs without any checksum, which allowed HTTP servers to change the asset at any time! And they had absolutely no uniqueness checks, allowing automating piracy!
You could literally copy an image, and make a new token for it, and there was no way to decide which token was the true one for any given image, except maybe if you trusted some central authority, haha.
> Imagine buying a song or video game online, and then being able to sell it or give it to a friend later, without having to go through a central authority (and not be breaking copyright law).
I don't have to imagine it. That's the reality right now without NFTs in the mix.
You would need a central authority (the copyright holder) to maintain a list of legitimate NFTs. However, you would not need to get their permission whenever you want to sell them.
How do you plan to sell some digital artifact is you either a) don't have a right do this, or b) have a right but the medium (NFT and blockchain) doesn't support transfer of the IP rights in any form? You would need the central authority to track IP rights and ownership in the centralised DB and which point why use NFTs in the first place?
> You would need the central authority to track IP rights and ownership in the centralised DB and which point why use NFTs in the first place?
You wouldn't need a single central authority, you could have multiple certifying agencies who would have their own reputation. Similar to how there are multiple ratings agencies that can certify a bond as AAA, or multiple art curators who can certify a painting as genuine, or different comic book graders.
The number of centralised authorities doesn't change the core problem in my question - how do you sell anything with attached IP rights when NFT infrastructure doesn't support this operation?
The NFT infrastructure supports buying and selling tokens. Attaching IP rights to that token can be done through the legal system, and third party agencies could attest on the blockchain that they believe the token has such a legal structure in place and properly set up (e.g. that the legitimate rightsholder has signed the release/deed/what-have-you in question).
> Oh, how cool, I didn't know that NFTs had a field called "legal system" inside. You probably pack those pesky IP rights into megawumbo package, and pass it to the Rockewell Turbo Encabulator which neatly packs them into just seven bytes.
You do it the other way round; the token is a token, you would set up a deed or a trust or what have you that associates whatever rights you want to with that token.
> The bullshit you are describing is called a centralised system and NFTs are completely not needed for it's functioning.
True enough. But there are things that the current system handles badly, and it's not great at transferring things quickly or internationally.
> That "legal system" will need to have a centralised DB and store ALL information inside it to verify real ownership.
The previous owner would need to set it up so that ownership irrevocably rested with the token bearer. But that's doable. (I'm not saying it's wise, but it's doable)
> Imagine buying a song or video game online, and then being able to sell it or give it to a friend later, without having to go through a central authority
Its a good idea to handle ownership of finite digital assets. Imagine buying a song or video game online, and then being able to sell it or give it to a friend later, without having to go through a central authority (and not be breaking copyright law). Just like with a CD.
Unfortunately, 99% of NFT projects have been essentially penny stock schemes, so now that's what everyone thinks of them as.