Thankfully, NFTs aren’t just a way for executives to hype up an underlying cryptocurrency they’re invested in. I’m confident the social media companies claiming NFTs are a pure hearted way to aid struggling artists will rush to integrate Cryptogogue’s legally sound toolkit for verifying ownership over digital artworks which is cheaper than any blockchain and devoid of financial conflicts of interest. These are very principled people who would never engage in financially-motivated thinking.
This page argues for registering artworks and going to courts to verify full chain of custody, not to mention having digital identities issued by a trusted authority, which is also usually not free.
All combined, this is a lot more expensive solution, not to mention a lot less global and time-intensive.
This is explicitly satire criticizing the concept of ownership of goods being derived from arbitrary tokens rather than defined by the extant legal framework in virtually every jurisdiction. From the end of the article:
>Q: Is any of this for real?
>A: No. Good lord. If you want to protect your digital rights, hire a lawyer. If it wasn't immediately clear that this is a work of satire, we've got some NFTs to sell you.
Check out, also, Writers Guild of America West.[1] They provide an online service for registering a file of up to 10MB. IIRC the fee is $25 or $50. The result is legal evidence, acccording to them.
One use case, so I heard: Rather than showing a copyright date on an old script (which can date it and suggest is has been rejected many times), the cover page can specify "Registered with WGAw"
- register and embed ISRC code that have been around since the late 80s into your recording to automatically handle licensing fees and track sales
- send registered letter containing the recording and any associated contracts to yourself and never open it (or to a bank safe or lawyer or something if you want to get fancy)
It's not sexy tech, but holds up in court. Doesn't solve all the problems the crypto world products claim to solve, but then again, the mechanics of getting paid is about the least of problems for artist imho.
> No. Mere possession of bytes does not prove ownership of a work, as many casual music pirates discovered during the early aughts. The more important question is "do I even own the artwork being right-clicked to begin with?" If you bought an NFT, you probably don't.
[...]
> There is no trustless way to prove ownership. If push comes to shove, you will need to appear in a court of law and identify each person on the chain of custody. So you can trust it as must as you trust each individual participant.
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The point, which
- many artists who have had their work stolen and minted without their permission have already realized,
- many owners who found out that NFTs can get scammed away from them have already realized,
- many users who are now grappling with platform decisions about what sales to allow have already realized,
- many owners who are trying to navigate what exactly they are legally allowed to do with their NFT tokens have already realized,
is that NFTs don't actually get rid of any of the legal problems or systems, and in fact often are completely subservient to those systems. For example, BAYC itself:
> The BAYC license states "You Own the NFT. Each Bored Ape is an NFT ... you own the underlying Bored Ape, the Art, completely." The license then goes on to place any number of restrictions on its use, implying that you don't, in fact, "own" the "underlying Art" at all.
NFTs don't solve the fundamental problem of trust, they only solve the problem of a shared ledger. And it turns out that they don't even solve the problem of trust in that ledger, and the community seems to be pretty split on questions like whether someone who steals an NFT from someone else "owns" it or not.
A lot of the NFT hype about distributed consensus boils down to "the code is law, except for these exceptions when it's not, and except for when the code has a bug, and except for when the real law steps in and threatens to send someone to jail." In short, if the answer to "how do I know an NFT is legitimately issued by the artist who made the artwork" is "community consensus/law", then the blockchain isn't actually solving the problem of ownership, the community/law is.
"That's My Ape" offers transparent, user-facing reliance on a system that everyone in the NFT space is already relying on anyway.
