Gonna be honest - I don't really understand any of this.
IIRC the discussion the other day, where someone shared the terms, it stated they're buying the NFT not the copyright/rights to the video.
So what does deleting it actually mean? The NFT owner can't do anything with it other than say "I own the NFT" (they can't monetise it), and assuming there's going to be some kind of policing around the deletion, it's just going to be whack a mole on YouTube/WhateverTube with uploaders and people that still want to watch a cute video from 2007 (and don't care about NFTs or it being the 'actual, real, original' upload).
You apparently 'bought' a star but anyone can look at it, I imagine that multiple people own the same star and everyone is none the wiser.
I assume this is why NFTs work. Make someone pay for 'exclusivity' (real or not) and then just assume that most people won't look into the details, where the devil is.
Indeed. All this talk of NFTs, but what blockchain are they on? Don't new blockchains pop up everyday? I mean, my own blockchain (a text file I only append to, but let's not get sidetracked on implementation details) says I own Charlie Bit My Finger. Now what?
If you were to input some sort of contract terms into a cell, snapshot it, upload it to the cloud and only provide view access to the public, you would have a full fledged blockchain platform.
Can't use Google Sheets because that would centralize it, I imagine?
I think this oversimplifies things. Would you “buy” the Mona Lisa from a random website with the condition that you have no rights to the property? I wouldn’t. If the Mona Lisa was put on sale by the Louvre with the aforementioned clause, I would be intrigued.
I mean, possibly, if you're the curator of the Louvre.
.. are you the curator of the Louvre?
I assume while we're on the topic that the guarantee has been written into a formal legal document, witnessed by a recognised party, that is enforceable in court, and which guarantees the terms in perpetuity?
I have trouble understanding NFTs too (article author here).
The closest I’ve come to understanding them is this: an NFT is an abstract handle to which various rights can optionally be attached. So (in theory) it becomes an easy way to have a marketplace for those rights, and this previously hasn’t been simple for digital assets.
In this case, one of the rights attached to the NFT in the sale is that the counterparty may choose whether the YouTube-hosted video continues to be public. (And, in this case, I would argue that the specific YouTube endpoint is almost as significant as the video itself.)
> an NFT is an abstract handle to which various rights can optionally be attached.
What I find confusing is the following:
Rights are meaningless without enforcement (in the real world). Who is going to enforce NFTs? There's no government or other authority standing behind this tech.
Compare NFTs with patents/digital rights - in both cases I "own" the artwork in some sense, but digital rights/patents, there are entire mechanisms that ensure these rights can be enforced.
With NFT, I can just ignore them without any issue.
You make a license that ties rights to the NFT, and use the legal system. E.g. a license that says "whoever holds this NFT gets the right to display the artwork it's for", if you want to sort-of match the sale of a traditional artwork.
In other words, its a digital certificate of ownership/rights that has no enforcement mechanism and still requires a contract, a lawyer, a court, and a society that enforces rights laws to run.
NFTs are actually speculation scams being run on the uninformed using buzzwords like blockchain and crypto while themselves being worthless. A digital certificate of authenticity for an infinitely reproducible good which still requires major cost and legal intervention to enforce.
A highly corrupt speculation scam using buzzwords about blockchain.
I’m almost tempted to setup-shop ‘stealing’ NFTs and displaying them in a gallery, I imagine if I set everything up off shore to the US that I will risk pretty little
Anyone does DMCA etc even apply here? Even if it does, I can just host in a country that ignores it…
Luckily there is nothing to enforce absent parties contractually tying rights to NFT holders. And at that point you just have a contract, enforced by the courts.
Charlie and his older brother will work in the new compliance department where they search Youtube and Dailymotion every day and flag CBMF duplicate uploads.
My understanding is that buying an NFT is essentially buying the right to control a cell in a spreadsheet (the "shared ledger"). If you buy the NFT, you are buying the right to have your name in the "owner" column of a line in the spreadsheet that corresponds to a particular media identifier, at least until you transfer that right to someone else.
Absent further agreement by the parties, buying the line in the spreadsheet doesn't mean anything. You don't actually own or control anything other than having your name in that cell of the spreadsheet, next to an identifier (e.g. a URL) that identifies a piece of media.
There could be a thousand lines in the spreadsheet tied to the same piece of media. I.e., the original author of a piece of media can sell as many cells in the spreadsheet as he or she wants.
Owning an NFT -- meaning controlling the cell in the spreadsheet -- does not mean that you own the copyright or even that you have a license to display or copy the work unless the copyright holder chooses to tie those rights to whoever is in the cell in the spreadsheet. It just means that you control that cell for the time being.
I haven't seen the terms for this particular NFT sale, but there is no reason that they needed to remove it from YouTube unless they decided they wanted that to be part of the transaction.
But considering how trivially easy it is to just reupload the video, unless they plan to play copyright wack a mole, it will never actually be deleted.
I downloaded a copy the other day. We named our daughter Charlie, and when she's old enough we want her to understand why all the older people she meets think it's hilarious to say her name with a British accent.
I can explain this - a lot of people miss the point of NFTs so I can illustrate the value here.
Buying an NFT is kind of akin to buying an autographed photo (so in this case, the person has paid the money to buy a signature from the person who shot the clip originally).
If you buy a signed photograph from Taylor Swift, you don't own the rights to Taylor Swift, her likeness, or even that photograph - but you still have a photograph that Taylor Swift herself (probably) signed. You don't care if someone else uploads the same signed photograph of her or she sells the same signed photograph to thousands of other people. It doesn't matter - because you wanted a signed photograph of Taylor Swift.
Would anyone really pay $760,999 for a hash that references a YouTube clip and expect that they then "own" the video because they have the hash? Of course not. No-one is that naive. They just really wanted an autograph from the person who made the video, and thought their signature worth $760,999.
Does it matter if it's not worth anything to anyone else? No more than it matters to a Taylor Swift fan if other people are not as excited about the photo they could have looked at for free but decided to pay $760,999 for.
As long as the buyer is happy with the autograph, and the understanding that it provides no rights whatsoever and is likely not worth much to anyone else, what's the problem with them spending SEVEN HUNDRED AND SIXTY THOUSAND AND NINE HUNDRED AND NINETY-NINE DOLLARS for an autograph from the Charlie bit my finger dad?
Now, you may think to yourself that almost $800K USD is a bit much for a single autograph from a person that shot a YouTube video one time that got popular by random chance, but you have to remember that no matter what happens that buyer is going to be telling their grandkids one of two really interesting stories on their deathbed that both centre around that autograph.
I came to the comment section to better understand what's the opinion on NFTs too :)).
I could see some edge-case uses with these NFTs, but I feel a lot of its usefulness is exaggerated. In my opinion, anything that's digital can't have its access enforced once out in the public. Only laws can restrict an agent (humans, usually) from gaining contact with the digital asset if it's public (or out in the public by any means, be it a copy on the internet or a CD, HDD, card etc.).
I keep thinking my opinion is wrong and there's something magic about these NFTs that I didn't understand.
If you were ignoring the collectibles market before NFTs, you can ignore the collectibles market now.
The concept is not that hard, no different than purchasing a pokemon card, or more aptly a ‘rare’ skin in an online game.
Its just microtransactions that everyone can verify if you were first or not. The market willingness to pay a premium just bakes in the lack of need for appraisal or legal dispute over the collectible ownership history. It has nothing to do with actual superior rights conveyed.
Let's say I buy a collectible silver coin which is a limited edition emitted by the government or some entity. This has both value in that it's rare, and that it's made of silver and so can appreciate in value over time.
Would it be correct to think of NFTs in the same way, but adding a higher risk associated to it? (the risk of the copy leaking in the public and thus cancelling any benefit of the supposed ownership this NFT blockchain would grant - excluding the possibility of an NFT blockchain becoming some kind of worldwide enforced standard way of verifying ownership...but even then...)
Yes but I think you are overthinking the risk and overestimating the formation of a secondary market.
But most people overestimate these things in the collectible market.
All you get is the ease of prior price discovery and history of ownership. That’s only useful after the market has decided your edition was the valuable edition.
Copies leaking isn’t important because the history of ownership shows you were the only owner, at an earlier date. Literally solves all of the provenance and forgery issues that have plagued art world for millenium. People pay a premium for just that. Has nothing to do with comparisons to physical attributes or rare metals used. Like I said, a better analogy - for now - would be improvements to rare items in online games that people already were spending time and resources to acquire and trade. If you recall, many people weren’t willing to understand intangibles there either. Regardless, it is an extension of the same crowd and the same sentiment. Shareholders in the gaming company could pressure them to increase the supply of a rare item in a database, with NFTs that is not possible as earlier provenance can’t be modified. It assumes the market is discerning but if it already cares about a piece than it is. If it doesn’t, a secondary market would likely never form for the “investment” to begin with.
No. While both rare coins and NFTs have value as a collectable, it's different because the silver coin has at least some intrinsic value. NFTs do not.
If no one else wants your NFT, it's not worth anything. If one other person wants it, it's worth whatever it is to them. If you buy NFTs for value, you should consider it a part time job to continue the hype machine for your NFTs in the hopes of getting some sort of bidding war going for them among as many people as possible. This isn't so different from other collectible markets. This hype machine is likely the reason you know what an NFT is in the first place.
Collectibles are limited editions, or otherwise rare or hard to find items for hobbyists. Stamps, baseball cards, antique furniture pieces etc. It's a market because there are a community of people with that shared interest. Is there such a community around this?
CBMF is a grainy home video that doesn't feature anybody famous, or provide context to some historic event. There is no CBMF fan club. It's just a transient memory for most people, one out of numerous YT videos they've watched over the years.
I liked the idea of NBA Top Shot, but it is clearly a victim of its own success. I wasn't a card collector growing up, but I knew baseball cards would become more in demand if a player broke out, won an award, or became famous by some other means. Smarter fans were able to forecast that, and were able flaunt their collection or sell for a profit.
But for the most part this was playground stuff or convention centers. Now you have one centralized marketplace where all fans from anywhere in the world compete, so the most lucrative approach is to court "whales" who can spend extravagantly. I just wish there were a way for them to set up "minor leagues" so it can become an approachable hobby again.
I get the impression that the folks spending a lot on NFTs are using some kind of crypto coin to pay, and that crypto coin may have a certain dollar valuation now but had a much lower dollar value when they obtained the coin. In other words it doesn't feel like they are actually spending the dollars, the effort to obtain those coins was less than the effort to obtain the actual dollars.
NFTs make money laundering and tax evasion exponentially easier than traditional collectibles. They’re also a new enough thing that asking for forgiveness after getting caught just might work.
There’s also the get-rich-quick aspect. A lot of the same reasons people “invest” in crypto. Exclusivity, novelty, and a lot of really naive traders flush with crypto cash.
Could the owner of the NFT own the copyright to the video? If so, buying the NFT would provide the right to sue people who are violating that copyright, right?
The creator of a thing can decide to remove their copy of it and not license it further.
Someone else can pay for a token that signifies... something. At the very least, that they've purchased a token. I'm not sure what more.
Although unlike the author I'm okay with only the people who were so into a "cute baby" level video that they downloaded it for retaining a copy. Popular media getting forgotten in the churn of history is rather normal and it's worked out okay so far.
This is the big question I’ve yet to find a solid answer to about NFTs. First year law students are taught that property rights are a “bundle of sticks”[1] but I have absolutely no idea which “sticks” (if any?) an NFT conveys.
YouTube already cannot delete the video. As mentioned in the article, Bin Laden had a copy of it on his hdd. How many other drives have a copy? Unlike the Mona Lisa postcards, these copies are just as good as the origin and I disagree that the YouTube URL is somehow important to the video's preservation.
Admittedly, the copyright situation is a bit less clear though. Presumably the video will become public domain at some point, at which time the Internet Archive can offer it as they already do for other out of copyright video.
> Admittedly, the copyright situation is a bit less clear though.
Well, according to Wikipedia, an NFT is a piece of data which acts as a proof of ownership, (essentially like a deed from a notary public) "that is separate from copyright".
As for copyright, that's clearly about exclusive rights of authorization (per the Berne convention) which are protected on the part of the original creator. In this case, the original creator was the Davies-Carr family who first made the home video and uploaded it to YT.
The difference between analog art and digital art is "uniqueness". That is, there's one physical original copy of the Mona lisa handcrafted by Leonardo Da Vinci, and it hangs in the Louvre. Sure, there are millions of printed copies of the image on the canvas, but the true value of that particular copy is that it's the first rendition of the image of the Mona Lisa in the physical world. The closest you can get to that in the digital world would be the storage medium that contains the original file as it was first created (I suppose that would be the home recorder of the Davies-Carr family).
So, NFT, in this regard, is about establishing "ownership" of the original copy. Pretty much like an art collector wants to actually own the original first rendition, as made by the artist.
What wasn't sold here is the copyright. It's the ownership of the particular copy which was uploaded on YouTube.
Barring extending any license of intellectual property to the buyer, the exclusive rights that authorize who gets to make a copy, and publish that copy online,... are still firmly in the hands of the Davies-Carr family.
This is an important distinction since it might bite art collectors: buying a work doesn't automatically imply you also own the copyright to that work. On the contrary.
> Presumably the video will become public domain at some point
Under UK law, that would mean: 70 years after the death of the original creator. Depending on the age of the Davies-Carr family members (and wishing them a long and healthy life), "Charlie bit my finger" won't enter the public domain before 2100.
Copyright in the digital era is massively problematic as most content copied and shared online is almost invariably violating someone's copyright.
Sharing a copy of "Charlie bit my finger" via a torrent isn't violating the rights of the person who ends up being mentioned as "owner" in the NFT. It's essentially violating the rights of the original author which are, presumably, still the Davies-Carr family.
Put more succinctly, the Davies-Carr family could be entirely cool with someone asking them "Hey, I have a copy of your video, okay if I upload it back to YouTube?" and the NFT owner can't do a single thing about it.
So, by now it should be clear what the actual problem with NFT's is.
What you hope to buy is the experience of owning an original piece. In the analog world, this carries quite a lot of different layers of meaning: this pertains to the idea of having the actual canvas, rope, paint,... hanging off your wall; but also the story tied to the particular physical object: it's tribulations as it survived history, the fact that it has an established provenance and you, as owner of the object, becoming an inextricable part of the object's history. You'd buy art not just for the sake of owning, but also because you tie yourself to it's history, and it becomes a vessel that helps you transcend your own mortality (famous art collectors become part of the historic narrative).
As far as NFT's go, that's totally not the case. The buyer of "charlie bit my finger" bought a copy which merely resided on the hard drives of YouTube. Even that copy is arguably original as "Charlie bit my finger" has been with YouTube for years, and probably was copied / transferred many times over between Google's data centers. In the digital world, it's simply impossible to attain the same kind of "value" you'd get from buying an object in the physical, analog world.
... the only reason why someone was willing enough to pay $760k for this NFT is because they genuinely believe it's equivalent in value compared to buying on the analogue art market.
> ... the only reason why someone was willing enough to pay $760k for this NFT is because they genuinely believe it's equivalent in value compared to buying on the analogue art market.
I'm not sure that's the case. They may just be speculating that someone will be willing to pay more for the NFT in the future. It may be it's even beneficial to them that they don't have to exhibit or secure the art themselves.
1. What does "ownership" mean in this case? It seems that the NFT holder has basically no rights when it comes to the work. (since, as you point out, ownership of the NFT is different from owning e.g. the copyright on the work)
2. If the rights of the NFT holder are violated (whatever those might be), who would enforce them?
NFT is blockchain technology. And so, there's wallets as well, which are just private keys to which a unique token on the blockchain is assigned. Pretty much like "having a bitcoin in your wallet". The difference with cryptocurrency is that the tokens are provably unique, and therefor non-fungible (tokens aren't interchangeable unlike gold, oil or money.)
An NFT represents a digital asset (regardless of where the asset is stored), and so if you have an NFT in your wallet, you can prove, by extension, that you own that digital asset. An NFT is basically a certificate of ownership. In law, the equivalent would be a "deed" or "title deed" (common law)
The rights of an NFT holder could be violated if someone were to break/hack their wallet and transfer the token to another wallet. Resolving this is hard since you proving the intent behind transaction isn't part of NFT technology. That's where you end up in the classic legal system for arbitrage. Doubts about the regularity of the chain of property, as recorded in the blockchain within crypto, are called "cloud on title" in U.S. property law.
Now, imagine the difficulties of contesting ownership acquired across international borders in different jurisdictions. NFT's do not solve that problem. All they do is prove authenticity and record provenance.
Right. But if the NFT can be stolen or fraudulently transferred, and you have to resort to a central authority to enforce a legal right that exists outside of the NFT, what makes it better than a paper deed?
At that point it’s just an artifact representing a legal right that exists independently, which could just as easily be represented by any of the existing methods (e.g., paper, PDF, etc).
> The al-Qaeda leader had a series of animated films on his hard drive including Antz, Cars, Chicken Little and The Three Musketeers.
There were also several YouTube videos, including a viral clip from the UK called "Charlie bit my finger" and videos about crocheting, including one entitled "How to crochet a flower". The role-playing computer game Final Fantasy VII was also on the computer.
FF VII is actually a really good choice if you’re stuck inside for months or years on end. I’m baffled as to how OBL came to understand that, though.
I have a revolutionary idea. Instead of writing Quote Unquote Great Works, we could use a symbol to denote the Quote (opening) and Unquote (closing) around the word or sentence, like $Great Works$. We could even use the quote symbol (") for this purpose, which is kind of neat.
I wouldn't use this personally, but to me it's pretty clear that the use of 'quote-unquote' is meant to denote sarcasm more strongly than quotation marks.
Did the family sell an NFT of the digital representation only, or the representation AND the copyright?
Furthermore, there are numerous problems with digital archival that need to be addressed.
Some pages have complicated backend dependencies (APIs, tokens, dynamic content) that make naive mirroring effectively useless for preservation. Example would be some of the old versions of patches and KB articles from the Microsoft Windows support site when it wasn't as simple as visiting a plain webpage but redirection to dynamic content. Downloads often required an extra redirection to a mirror or some sort of analytics check-in to get a concrete (one-time token authorized too?) link.
Does digital archival require a right to be forgotten?
Media players, converters, and complete documentation about formats need to be preserved in order for media to be useful indefinitely.
How about describing the encoding of plain text documents so that that's preserved too?
Capturing as much metadata as reasonably possible so that it can be useful for future users and researchers.
The incongruence of NFTs is they basically require the state to strongly enforce copyright claim to actually have any value outside of bragging rights. A state with rigid, strong copyright enforcement is not something I personally value, and doesn’t seem to be the sentiment of people buying and selling these NFTs, so bragging rights it is?
That's the thing. I don't see how selling an NFT alone is functionally any different than selling a copy of the SHA3 of a digital artifact: something anyone can do.
To me, it's reducible to the equivalent of a seller saying "I will sell you the answer to 1 + 2." That seems inherently worthless.
It's only worthwhile if rich idiots are trading these mathematical answers around like baseball cards. But then, I don't see how they can "own" them if they or anyone can just make infinite copies of them when/if they ever have access to the "private key" material.
Ownership of the underlying digital asset doesn't make sense either. Again, there don't seem to be obvious legal or technical protections to stop anyone from making copies.
You can't see me in my ninja outfit furiously rolling-up the Mona Lisa into a floatable titanium tube to be sealed in a salt-plugged chamber hidden on the side of my speedy, automated, self-sufficient, 150 M super-yacht. Nothing to see here. Move along. <-- The gist of what's happening but without the actual "Mona Lisa."
Yup. Effectively, printing their own currency of large denominations and trading in real money for them. Which then reduces to people stuffing real money into ever smaller suitcases for exfil and cleaning, regardless if they're new shiny thing dabblers, corporate pirates, actual pirates, or drug dealers.
In the future, it'll be exclusive to the CBMF Streaming Network ($7.99/month).
I'm grateful that music didn't end up fragmented into a multitude of walled gardens like video. You can listen to almost all popular music with 2 popular flat-rate services. It could have turned out much, much worse.
Podcasts are the current battleground. I can't predict how that will turn out.
Can't wait for Gruber to start NFTing each of his Daring Fireball blog posts. He's done extremely well selling a single tasteful banner ad for, last I checked, $6,000/week on his site. Blog posts by popular authors are actually a decent fit because they're like cryptographically sponsoring something--at least you'd get exposure for the money you spent.
Lots of people here saying they don't see the point of NFTs. I totally agree for digital artefacts like this video. After all, the original can be copied perfectly as many times as necessary.
Wouldn't they actually be more useful for (say) ownership deeds of a property, or car or something?
In theory, possibly?
But for things like vehicles, and especially land, the existing processes work OK in the places where they are well developed, and where land registries are unclear, NFTs probably don’t help much because the bigger problems are things establishing who exactly is the owner and do you have an effective court system with fair rule of law.
An NFT would also have to accurately describe the asset which gets trick with land since it tends to slowly move in places and at the same time old records remain important. Eg in the UK compulsory land registration has been rolling out since the 1920s and the register has existed for nearly 160 years, but title to something like 10% of the UK is not in the land register, and may never be.
No. As has been explored to death in recent articles, the last thing you want is the ability to irreversibly transfer ownership of your car or your home in seconds (and potentially accidentally).
When you have a deed to a car, states have well established laws for how the transfer of ownership occurs, and well established methods for dealing with problems in that transfer. If the deed to your car is tied to an NFT, and than NFT gets fraudulently transferred, it's irreversible absent recourse to the legal system to get a new NFT that represents your deed. And at that point you might as well just have had a normal deed.
Fascinating. After it’s deleted from YouTube, I wonder what searches for the video will show, and how long before we converge on some new copy as being the canonical link.
Usually NFTs embed a canonical link to the media they're supposedly tokenizing. I would be very interested in what URL this NFT points to- if it's not a publicly available version of the video then what's it even an NFT "of"?
Not everything needs to be "saved". We have tons of articles already about this short video and the parents have the right to delete it if they want. The same way I have the right to delete content I own.
NFTs, Crypto (or what Crypto has become), and a few other current Internet phenomena give me an overwhelming sense of rot.
Everything is rotting. I'm not sure if it's too much capital, capital on the wrong places, capital and not enough oversight, or whatever, but the Internet as we knew it will be dead and gone without sincere effort. In its place will be a paved over, child safe playground optimized for ad delivery, emotional reactions, and propaganda.
IIRC the discussion the other day, where someone shared the terms, it stated they're buying the NFT not the copyright/rights to the video.
So what does deleting it actually mean? The NFT owner can't do anything with it other than say "I own the NFT" (they can't monetise it), and assuming there's going to be some kind of policing around the deletion, it's just going to be whack a mole on YouTube/WhateverTube with uploaders and people that still want to watch a cute video from 2007 (and don't care about NFTs or it being the 'actual, real, original' upload).
Strange times.