I'm still confused to what NFT has to offer that Copyright Law doesn't
charles
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[I'm still confused to what NFT has to offer that Copyright Law doesn't] see title
Post edited by Richard Haseltine on
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NFT has nothing to do with copyright
Your confusion is not unjustified... I'm presuming you ask this because NFTs are being touted as a way to ensure your art or any digital art is protected from being stolen or copied... a magical bullet that stops digital art thieves from purloining one's art.
Its not.
Blockchain, the heart of cryptocrap is a brilliant way of legitimizing things like legal contracts, complex license agreements and stuff like that... and yeah, even virtual money... but with NFTs that doesn't really matter since anyone can mint a stolen copy of your work and sell it using the anonymity of crypto to evade justice.
Literally the very nature of crypto was designed to evade government intervention of any sort... taxes, financial regulations and records of who sold or bought what.
Yet despite that, slick techno bros keep telling everyone NFTs will solve digital art theft.
Right.
A system where a thief is totally untraceable and can steal anyone's work and sell it to anyone willing to pay for it anonymously is definitely a better way...
Technically if everyone who sold digital art went NFT, that might create a minor problem for those who steal digital art, but then there is the needing another planet to live on problem and the fact that people already copy minted NFTs and sell them with zero consequences, so basically no real barriers to ripping people off at all.
Blockchain really only serves a non dystopian function for legal contracts and those sort of things where all parties need to be on the same page, agree to remain identifiable and then if the blockchain get broken you know where it occurred.
Using it to make funny money and collectible vapor is just slick people finding a way to exploit a concept that other people don't actually understand.
Also, remember one other feature about blockchain... it progressively becomes harder to hash solutions, and thus mining takes longer, requires more electricity, and not too surprisingly more computational power.
A few year ago people were mining in the background on their stupid little laptops... Now you need to invest in crypto rigs running 24/7 and the only people getting rich are folks running banks of these rigs... and for how long?
At some point you'll have mining firms as the only ones mining coin and eventually they'll "have to" make their own rules just like banks do.
The cost of minting NFTs will eventually increase to the point where just like with early mining, it will be unaffordable to anyone but the most richest artists...
Do people not see that?
Dumb question, because no, most people don't understand how this works or listen just long enough to hear "get rich quickly"...
So, in that regard, if that was the intention of the original question... yes, copyright law has absolutely nothing to do with NFTs supposed protectional powers... it's completely misstating it's function and application.
Copyright law isn't a bed of roses either though... and it mostly works if you have the legal means to pursue violations... otherwise your just as screwed... but it does work.
Thanks for the clarificatin, that is about how I thought it worked. There is some lazy mentions about protection within the NFT sales pages but I couldn't fathom anyway that actually meant anything if like you said not everyone was on the same page. So what's the point of even bothering to tie a images to blockchains? Why not just use a hashcode based off the image itself? From as you said the need to "mine" the code (Oh and by the way my Norton AV mines for me when my computer"S" are idle, which basically seems to pay for the Norton subscription for them.) I get bitcoins, I have a good investment in many of them and those I get, this NFT just seems....scammy. But I had an uncle over Thanksgiving tell me how Bitcoin sounded like a scam. But when I told him how there was several hundred Bitcoin ATM's throughout the city, so how is it not legit? So I started rethinking about NFT's and maybe like my Uncle I had it all wrong. The only thing I can see an NFT being worth anything is a legal means of protecting something. But then that's what copyright laws are too and like you said aren't perfect. But you do have legal recourse unlike with an NFT. And a guy in Russia or China is still going to rip your work and good luck with your copyright, but I guess same goes for NFT?
One of my old programming associates was one of the original developers of hashcoding systems in the early 90s. I have accredited links from major universities on implimentation of NLP hash structuring and databasing. So I still don't get why a hasher wouldn't be better than a blockchain and stored in a network. As I joked in another thread, I could just as easily just assign each image a number i++ and become the authoritiy on for teach assigned number. So if that's the case then really those making the money is those "authorities" assigning the numbers.
Thanks for the clarificatin, that is about how I thought it worked. There is some lazy mentions about protection within the NFT sales pages but I couldn't fathom anyway that actually meant anything if like you said not everyone was on the same page. So what's the point of even bothering to tie a images to blockchains? Why not just use a hashcode based off the image itself? From as you said the need to "mine" the code (Oh and by the way my Norton AV mines for me when my computer"S" are idle, which basically seems to pay for the Norton subscription for them.) I get bitcoins, I have a good investment in many of them and those I get, this NFT just seems....scammy. But I had an uncle over Thanksgiving tell me how Bitcoin sounded like a scam. But when I told him how there was several hundred Bitcoin ATM's throughout the city, so how is it not legit? So I started rethinking about NFT's and maybe like my Uncle I had it all wrong. The only thing I can see an NFT being worth anything is a legal means of protecting something. But then that's what copyright laws are too and like you said aren't perfect. But you do have legal recourse unlike with an NFT. And a guy in Russia or China is still going to rip your work and good luck with your copyright, but I guess same goes for NFT?
So I still don't get why a hasher wouldn't be better than a blockchain and stored in a network. As I joked in another thread, I could just as easily just assign each image a number i++ and become the authoritiy on for each assigned number. So if that's the case then really those making the money is those "authorities" assigning the numbers.
Bingo!!!
This whole discussion is beside the point - NFTs are not a method of protecting copyright, they are a way of showing a provable owndership of a specific piece of data (usually a URL).