I don't think it's that: it's a key associated within a particular distributed database to a hash of some digital (or digitized) art, as far as I know.
Yes, I agree. It's slightly more indirect than digital art but the consequence is the same. It's equivalent to copyright. I own this thing. Here is the proof - the NFT.
If you - a tv show, movie, etc - want to use it you can license it from me.
Except an NFT is basically just a link to some JSON which has a URL to an image. You could easily make another NFT yourself with a different link to the same image, whose NFT is the "real one"? How could you prove who made the original image and who sold it? NFTs don't any actual rights to the image and certainly don't stop people copying and using it. It's a load of crap basically.
I thought "the real" NFT is determined by what people decide "the real" one is. This is not actually a problem. NFTs are (or at least can be) a certificate of authenticity within a cryptographic framework. You can forge any physical certificate of authenticity with enough time and effort, but if you manage to forge a cryptographic one in our lifetime then congratulations! You just broke encryption.
Tangentially related: It amazes me how poorly people seem to understand anything in this space but especially cryptocurrency. In maybe one out of hundred discussions on cryptocurrency do I see any mention of a ledger, which is the entire point. If you use Venmo or any similar cash exchange app then you automatically stand to benefit from the use of a cryptocurrency. Venmo is a ledger. The only reason you are able to send $1 a thousand times a day to your friend with no transaction fee is because you're not actually sending any money to anyone (as most people would understand it). You're changing values in Venmo's database which is an implementation of a digital ledger. Only when you "square up" with Venmo by transferring money out of Venmo into your own bank account does any money move anywhere (in a way that would cost Venmo a non negligible amount of money themselves).
Cryptocurrencies are digital ledgers that, unlike Venmo, are decentralized and cryptographically backed. This means its physically impossible for Venmo (or anyone) to freeze or seize your assets, and impossible for your balances to be hacked or manipulated by a bad actor with too much authority (although your private keys can certainly still be hacked through side channels). Is that worth the energy cost of supporting a system like Bitcoin for every transaction? Not in my opinion, but I wish people would at least make an attempt at understanding what they hell they're talking about.
> NFTs are (or at least can be) a certificate of authenticity within a cryptographic framework.
NFTs are a cryptographic certificate of authenticity for... themselves. There is nothing about NFTs that authenticates anything tangible, digital or otherwise. That is what makes them useless. It's a self referencing, pointless exercise. Anyone can mint an NFT and buy and sell it... but all you've done is create an abstract digital object. The actual copyrightable asset the NFT points to is not authenticated, protected, or otherwise related in any way other than by trust - it's literally a URL, it could be anything. And if you're trusting people again, that's neither decentralized nor any different from traditional auction/trade platforms.
Your knowledge of NFTs is likely greater than mine so correct me if I'm wrong. Pointing to a URL is fine if you trust URL digital signatures. Hypothetical situation: I'm a famous artist X. I produce great painting 123 and want to issue a certificate of authenticity for it. So I post on my webpage X.com/123 a sentence "I just produced painting 123 and generated NFT 456 for it on the Ethereum blockchain" NFT 456 points to X.com/123 and the Ethereum blockchain contains the ownership information (namely that X currently owns it). Since this is on the Ethereum blockchain, I assume dilettante Y can now purchase NFT 456 from me for 1M Ethereum as a single transaction. Is this not how it's supposed to work? Is there an obvious attack vector here I'm missing?
Edit: maybe the obvious attack vector is the mutability of the sentence posted to X.com/123, so I feel like I'm close to a good system but missing something.
> I just produced painting 123 and generated NFT 456 for it on the Ethereum blockchain"
Upon which you have to trust the artist that they actually did produce the painting themselves, and own the copyright to it, and are authorized to mint an NFT of it. If it later turns out they didn't, the NFT is a fraud. So you're still relying on centralized trust.
You also have to trust the artist not to "double-spend" their work and put it up as an NFT elsewhere or sell its copyright. The NFT itself is not tied to copyright, so there is no legal nor technical protection here.
NFTs are solid blockchain technology resting on a foundation of centralized trust (sure, distributed, but still individually centralized). It's completely against everything those crypto people claim they stand for and they don't even realize it.
It's in the damn name too. Non-Fungible Token. Token. Not Picture. The only thing you're buying and selling is a meaningless token.
I say this every time NFTs come up: go commission some custom artwork from your favorite artist instead, the normal way. At least that way you'll have something unique and personal instead of a procedurally generated monkey, and you don't need cryptononsense to know it's yours.
I agree with your assessment of the importance of trust in this example and the issues that go with it. I suspect similar issues crop up with non crypto systems as well but that's not really what I want to discuss.
NFTs still seem potentially useful to me. Let's take one more example: the Mona Lisa currently in the possession of France and held in the Louvre. How do I know all that? I looked it up on Wikipedia and "trust" what I've read. I trust it because I assume any time this painting changes hands its a carefully managed transactions likely involving 6 to 7 figures of USD (just for transaction "fees", not the value of the painting) toward dozens of people to verify various things (the authenticity of the painting, and the authenticity of the purchaser and purchaser's funds, and seller) as well as security, transportation, insurance, and desired publicity.
But maybe there's a different way to go about that kind of transaction. As long as we can establish a few initial conditions collectively with "trust", any future transactions for the Mona Lisa can be, in a way, protected with an NFT. Let's start by collectively agreeing to give the Mona Lisa NFT id "1" on the Ethereum blockchain and give France address "0x01". For whatever reason, the Mona Lisa gets sold to "0x05" as an Ethereum transaction. We no longer need to verify the authenticity of the purchaser's funds (hopefully obvious), nor do we really care who "0x05" is. Everyone who believes in cryptography can now establish that indeed "0x05" is the rightful owner of the Mona Lisa. I no longer need to trust a Wikipedia article, or be important enough to "know someone" who knows how to get in touch with "France" or whoever the current owner is if I'm a serious candidate to purchase it.
If the Mona Lisa gets stolen and later turns up, physically, anywhere, in anyone's hands, the world at least has the ability to say "prove you're 0x05". Anyone who has the ability to do so gets it. Yay! In theory, "0x05" can even sell the Mona Lisa to "0x06", WHILE IT IS IN A THIEF'S "POSSESION", and the rest of the world sans thief can agree that, indeed, "0x06" is now the rightful owner of the Mona Lisa. Pretty much the only thing the NFT doesn't help with at all here is destruction of underlying asset (the ink and canvas we collectively designate "The Mona Lisa").
I don't know. Maybe its a crazy idea. Maybe it just requires re-evaluating the importance we place on a particular organization of molecules (that are technically fungible!) with no utility. An atom-level, "perfect", physical reproduction of the Mona Lisa may even become a possibility one day. So maybe the more important thing really is the abstract idea of proof of ownership of some cryptographically protected numbers.
Also: Someone else can generate an NFT with the same URL in it. Thus, it becomes an exercise to verify the NFT out of band. At that point, in a lot of situations, it's not the NFT that's certifying the ownership, it's the public announcement by the artist. There's maybe a little to be gained because from that point forward, any transfers may be verified but... In the end the root of trust remains the public, out-of-band announcement of the NFT.
It is also worth noting that, in a lot of cases, NFTs don't actually confer any sort of special rights or ownership over the art. Often, NFTs are really just signed links to a thing that was not actually sold to you, with the actual legal ownership of the art staying with the seller.
No it's not like copyright. Copyright are legally enforceable, NFT aren't.
They are actually a lot of artists that complains that their art is stolen and sold as NFT and the platforms that allow this, don't want to handle the copyright infringements.
The whole idea of web3 is that identity is intertwined with all of this. NFTs will be enforceable because all web3 services will use the blockchain as the main arbiter of truth in the digital world. E.g. if you built an NFT based card game, no platform (game application, deck-building site, forum, etc.) would recognize your "fake" NFT as real.
You could build an nft based ticketing platform. The ticket issuer issues NFT tickets on the blockchain, all the infrastructure for trading NFTs is in place (you could literally trade concert tickets on OpenSea). There's no "forking" this NFT because the concert venue would only accept the ones they issue. You then show up to the concert venue with your phone, sign a message proving ownership of the ticket, and walk right in. This process eliminates all exploitative middlemen like ticketmaster because all the mechanisms for ticket distribution and selling have been built on web3 already.
Next time you're doing production work on a TV show or movie and want to use a piece of media in your production without licensing it, try running "Hey, we can just right-click it" past the studio legal department. I'm fairly sure they'll have some objections.
I mean, I agree with the common snark you're making about NFTs here, but the part you quoted is the part the OP is correct on. :) The part they're getting wrong is conflating NFTs with copyright. An NFT could conceivably be a license itself, but that's not the same thing.
> Next time you're doing production work on a TV show or movie and want to use a piece of media in your production without licensing it, try running "Hey, we can just right-click it" past the studio legal department. I'm fairly sure they'll have some objections.
Yep the only thing that stops me is centralised copyright regime, not Blockchain. Blockchain can be a proof of license/ownership but not because of its inherent value, but because we believe particular issuer. Also it's fairly easy for Blockchain to loose connection between who legally own/license particular art with what is on it. Copyright is hard, and sometimes the answer is we don't know.
> If you - a tv show, movie, etc - want to use it you can license it from me.
That's not necessarily true, from what I understand most NFT purchases are not transfer of copyrights.
Let's say I go to a store and buy a CD of my favorite artist. That CD comes with certain restrictions - I can listen to it with my friends, but I can't rent it out to a movie producer that wants to use one of the songs on that CD.
Similarly, when buying NFT, I can use it in a certain way, defined by the license, but unless it's specified, the copyrights still belong to the creator of the artwork.
I don't think it's that: it's a key associated within a particular distributed database to a hash of some digital (or digitized) art, as far as I know.