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Comment by ArtWomb | Hacker News Reader

“Why would you spend $5,000 on an MP4?"

That's the $64k question. Who, exactly, is buying rare digital art? It doesn't seem to be traditional collectors, dealers or major institutions. But the same contingent of crypto "whales" speculating in alt-coin assets. A simple bot could even be employed to track auction prices and automate trades. In a sense its not dissimilar to inter-market dealing among art galleries. Without the actual physical objects.

Beeple's Opus

https://www.christies.com/features/Monumental-collage-by-Bee...

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Would you spend $5k for the streaming rights to an mp4? Thats generally where people see NFTs going.

Mark Cuban was talking about this yesterday on bankless podcast, how an NFT can contain all the royalty payments for e.g. a film or tv show, director/producer/actors/editors, and when someone wants to show it they rent it for a period of time (or buy it to rent to others), their rent payment instantly divided across everyone involved. That utility saves a lot of time and money. His comparison is to how he still receives physical checks for $1 from some episode of a tv show he did that are barely worth cashing, saving time/money in that process is potentially big business.

What rights do you own with an NFT? Say I bought a digital piece, can I print it on a million t-shirts and sell them? Or does the artist still retain the copyright etc.?

I've seen people minting tweets as NFTs - again, how does the copyright work here.

Genuine question - seen NFTs come up a lot over the last fortnight - don't really understand it at all (which makes me feel old!).

These largely remain open questions.

Or rather, as far as I can tell the default off-chain answers apply in the absence of explicit directions otherwise.

Physical fine art has come up with answers (you don't get the copyright just because you bought the original), though, and I'm sure NFTs will eventually.

There's also the possibility of putting code into the smart contracts to explicitly give you the royalties earned on-chain. Not really a thing yet, but it's obviously possible to do.

Thanks!

So assuming this followed the physical art model, and in the absence of any kind of 'on chain' royalties, you're literally just buying to say "I own this"? Except you don't own the copyright, and, being a digital file, thousands of other people could have an identical copy?

Am I correct in thinking this is kind of 'digital bragging rights'? Like - without a physical copy, short of us all living in a 'Ready Player One' style virtual world that someone made it explicit that "XYZ owns this art by ABC" - there's not actually much you can do other than own it (and maybe sell it later)?

Hashmasks for example gave everyone copyright to their specific piece. And they're quite visually appealing too.

Its probably people with Crypto currency thats way up in value and a need to do something with it.

So... money laundering? Or just people with too many gains looking for something to spend it on?

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