NFT sales plummet nearly 90% from their peak as collectibles market cools

Correct. But the license owner can require the license buyer to use editors that preserve NFTs or be subject to automated DMCA notices. Once Adobe and Apple start respecting the NFT-copyright-format in their tools, other commercial vendors will be forced by the market to support it too.

Again, I'm not in favor of any of this. Just admitting that I am pessimistic enough to see where all of this could end up eventually.

Obviously any random person could create an NFT and claim that it represents ownership of a particular stock photograph, but that's not really relevant or problematic. You could also create a traditional paper certificate of title for your neighbor's car too, but obviously no one would respect it (unless they were tricked, but that's against the law and the legal system would tend to respect that genuine certificate of title).

As usual, you don't need a blockchain to do either of the two things you're talking about. For the copyright case, what matters is that you have a legal authorization which will be recognized by a court. An NFT can do that but so can an email or anything else — and the problem you're trying to avoid is a concern either way because the same people who require terms of use for their content aren't going to reverse course due to magical thinking advised by blockchain salespeople.

The secondary problem of unreliable cloud storage is similarly very expensively not solved by an NFT. Due to the inherent inefficiency of blockchains almost all NFTs point to a URL for the actual payload. If that hosting provider shuts down or restricts access, you have the same problem as you do now. Now, some people will say that IPFS solves this but if you've thought about the problem at all that is only a solution for content which is very popular and released under an open license: someone has to pay for the storage, even the few people willing to provide storage unpaid aren't going to do so for encrypted content which they can't access, and nobody who cares about access restriction is going to put it in a public blockchain anyway since they'd be one key leak away from the content being available without payment.

Thank you! You get what I'm talking about. Many folks here are replying to me as if I'm saying NFTs can prevent copyright infringements. That's not possible and not the goal. The goal would be to track ownership and handle violations more reliably than mass DMCA-notices that plague YouTube.

This issue doesn't exist, because an NFT gives you absolutely no legal rights whatsoever - only the law does.

I don't support HDCP or DVD-region-lock but they worked for the copyright owners without inconveniencing the users enough to affect the bottom-line. It's the technical users and hackers among us who have a problem with these.

I'm not looking forward to NFT everywhere for creatives, I'm saying I can see it happen. I don't want to sign every JPEG I edit but if the tools preserve the source signatures, it wouldn't really affect me.

Photoshop has had counterfeit detection system for over a decade. I'm sure Adobe would love to offer Getty + CS Cloud NFT-copyright integration if they can make it work. I'm sure they can come up with a catchy marketing name for it and build an ecosystem to license, edit, and distribute media with detailed tracking of every asset.

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Woo

>The term comes from "woo-woo", an epithet used in the 1990s by science and skeptical writers to ridicule people who believe or promote such things. This is in turn believed to have come from the onomatopoeia "woooooo!" as a reaction to dimmed lights or magic tricks. The term implies a lack of either intelligence or sincerity on the part of the person or concepts so described.

>As a coincidence, the Chinese word 巫 (pronounced in the Mandarin dialect as Wū) means a shaman, usually with magic powers. Also coincidentally, the Chinese word 無/无 (pronounced Wú in Mandarin) means "nothing," "lacking," or "negation." Another Chinese word 误 (pronounced in the Mandarin dialect as Wù) means "mistake" or "incorrect". There is also the English verb "woo", which means to seek someone's love, especially with false promises; it can also be considered appropriate, because woo-meisters seek people's admiration, falsely promising them miraculous and easily understandable knowledge.

The NFT cards with fake / digital signatures are particularly pathetic.

Or the way a physical card is designed, the way it looks in real lighting, the way its material properties exist and interact in physical space. There are qualities to that, and the manufacturing process involved, that you can never replicate with NFT collectibles. The same is true with physical vs digital art. Art hanging on the wall can have a majestic quality when it dances with lighting; digital art is flat garbage by comparison in that respect (even when it's really good digital art; it's bound to a screen in most cases). Manufacturing a nice physical collectible card to a high quality specification is dramatically more difficult than spitting out NFT cards by the zillions; quality control is a huge challenge in collectible cards. There's a scarcity effect generated in physical collectibles like cards, in regards to quality of manufacturing (damage, corners, centering, errors, etc), that doesn't exist in NFTs (unless you intentionally fake that, which would be something beyond stupid).

There are many aspects of physical vs NFT collectibles, where the NFTs will never be able to compete, not under any circumstances. And there are almost no benefits that an NFT has over a physical collectible, with the supposed simplicity of digital storage & transacting being the primary (which also has an obvious, huge risk / downside associated with it simultaneously).

Exactly the problem. If these were used to prove legal ownership of real assets, whether they be intellectual or physical, they would have value. Selling individually numbered digital pet rocks is not valuable.

It always links to a wallet and thus proves originality. You're right, anyone can mint a mona lisa and claim it's a van gogh, but if it wasn't minted using van goghs wallet, it's not van gogh.

>It isn't a copyright grant, a contract, legal ownership, or even a binary container

Say i have an octopus NFT. I am the only person who can transfer ownership of my octopus. you don't need 'Legal' ownership, this is real 'ownership' of my keys. You can show that this EXACT Octopus sold for $50m and was previously held by a wallet associated with mark cuban. Yes, some random can make a duplicate octopus but it won't be created by my wallet, mark cuban wouldn't have previously owned it and it wouldn't have previously sold for $50m in the metadata.

>Owning a rare gun skin in CS:GO is much more "real" than an NFT is.

How many people own the 'Rare gun skin in CS:GO? would you trust the company if they said only 5 people owned that rare gun skin? What's stopping them from infinitely minting the rare gun skin and saying there's only 100 of them. Would you be willing to pay more for the CS Skin if only 100 people could have it, than if it was inifinite? If CS:GO was to adopt a standard blockchain for the sale of their NFT's, you could see exactly who had what skins and what the bidding price is for them. Complete transparency in scarcity.

In the 1970s, people would buy rocks as pets. Yes really. Manias are real things.

Lol “Real”

To contrast, every digital good is exactly the same as the original. Heck, once the computer is turned off the first time, the original is technically gone, and a new copy was made when the computer turned back on.

The concept of originality goes away on a digital world.

This is the best lesson. People who try to add artificial scarcity will eventually be proven wrong (but con men have existed in all eras).

I think you can apply that same argument to something like a normal painting. Sure, the price for making copy isn’t zero, but it’s practically zero when comparing to the millions of dollars that the most expensive paintings are sold for. So why do people pay so much then? Because they want the original. That also applies for wanting to own the original version of a digital painting.

You have a meme, and someone sells you a little laminated card saying "I own the meme at this URL", and all it costs is $80,000 and you have to burn down an acre of rainforest. It's purely asinine in every respect, and, like a lot of crypto, is basically just a gold rush plus pyramid scheme.

And, identically, the NFT of a digital work is different from copies of the digital work because the artist actually issued the NFT.

> I could buy that the emphasis we put on the original having more value is arbitrary, but there's nothing actually arbitrary about selecting which painting is _the original_.

And again, the situation with NFTs is identical. There's nothing arbitrary about determining the NFT issued by the artist and who controls that NFT (assuming the NFT blockchain technology works as intended), in fact it should be much easier than determining the originality of a famous painting.

I think a big part of it is that once an artist has this status, it becomes part of the industry that tracks provenance and detects forgeries. If your cousin's painting was valuable without being part of this system, you could crank out 100 of them and no one would know which one was the original, or whether your cousin actually painted the other 99.

So in this way you're begging the question a little bit. If scarcity alone doesn't bring value, provable scarcity might.

whether or not digital good carry that same weight, is left to be seen.

I think people will want to have real true ownership over an asset, such that if the game provider stops running their marketplace or game, you can still own the asset. I could be wrong, but I really think there's demand there.

People have this idea that because NFTs are selling for $10M some moron must think that particular NFT is worth $10M and have spent $10M to buy it - presumably thinking it will be worth even more in the future and s/he can sell for a profit.

What an idiot, most people think...

However, it could just be that people are buying NFTs from themselves (like CryptoKitties) for massive sums, to attract the interest of get-rich-quick retail investors to spend ~$100 dollars on NFTs - just in case they're suddenly worth $10M a piece in a month. FOMO.

It's not like retail investors investing millions of dollars into NFTs. They don't have millions of dollars in the first place!

I should bring crime and decay to the neighborhood, buy my neighbors' houses out, and then sell my own house to myself for $10 million. Who wants to invest? Now offering NFTs as stock. :B

Collectibility needs a few things in the equation: rarity and here is the _big_ component, some shared nostalgia or cultural history. NFTs don't have that really any of these things.