Similar lack of rights when you buy a signed print. At no point in that transaction is a copyright transferred to you.
The print is beautiful and hanging on my wall.
The print won't evaporate when the url suddenly points to a server that was shutdown from lack of payment.
I know I bought a print, nobody was trying to trick me into thinking it was the original.
And, most importantly of all, the artist got paid.
The media does not evaporate as it is either on-chain, or distributed via IPFS (ie: peer-to-peer rather than a central server).
None of the artists I have purchased NFTs from have tried to trick me (including Anders Hoff, mentioned in the OP article, who has distributed his work as an NFT).
And, most importantly, the artists and non-profit organizations in the arts are getting paid via NFT sales.
:)
And I think for most people getting a piece of paper, physically signed by the author stating that it's their work is far more valuable than some UUID on a computer.
For reference, the last NFT I purchased on Hicetnunc.xyz had a protocol fee of 0.002947 XTZ (around 1¢ USD) and a platform fee of 2.5%, the rest of the sale went directly to the artist's wallet.
To your second point; this remains to be seen—society can place value on many different abstract concepts, "ink on paper" may not be the only valuable vehicle for art and culture.
Hicetnunc fees are fixed, and the free market gives an opportunity for other platforms to improve on this if the community desires a marketplace with lower fees (it's much easier to build an alternative to Hicetnunc than an alternative Stripe/Shopify/PayPal). Artists are also given a 10-25% royalty (which they decide) for each resale of a token on the Hicetnunc marketplace. And, of course, since it is all peer-to-peer, you are free to exchange art tokens with no fees at all, save the negligible protocol/transaction fees.
What society definitely can't place value on is a URL to a digital asset that may or may not be there tomorrow, because an uninsured, untrusted value store can't be relied on.
There's nothing saying NFT artifacts have to be digital, though, I'd think. Using them to facilitate trade of physical artifacts would back the trade with (relatively) reliable value stores (physical artifacts) while benefiting from the low transaction fees.
Not even legally. Unless the artist sold you an exclusive license to hang on your wall, I guess, which they can do with or without an NFT.
So why couldn't you have just donated money to the artists and right-click-saved / printed the art anyway, without involving a blockchain?
A simple way to frame Hicetnunc is a social media platform that is not driven by FAANG, advertising models, and "Like" buttons, but instead by artists, collectors, and OSS developers participating in a digital economy: selling and trading tokens, and also exploring ways to steward and maintain that work without solely relying on traditional centralized third-party services.
The lower fees derive from the medium used (crypto instead of traditional payment processors). You didn't need to involve a NFT to send crypto to the artist's wallet.
> acquiring ownership of an artist-signed asset, rather than a digital media file (the limited-edition token is cryptographically signed by the artist, the media file is not)
I'm going to refer to the rest of this comment thread about whether 'ownership' is a suitable word for having a cryptographic signature applied to your blockchain address, when the media file in question is bit-for-bit identical.
As you can guess, I hardly think so. There is nothing you can do as an 'owner' of a digital ape picture that anybody else who right-clicked it and saved it can't also do, with the possible exception of getting kudos from the artist for the money you gave them. But a simple donation would have had the same result.
> participating in a digital art community
Which hardly requires NFTs, only your involvement and communication. Online art communities go back to Elfwood.
> supporting decentralized systems, etc.
Tautology. "I use NFTs because I want to support the use of NFTs".
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> A simple way to frame Hicetnunc is a social media platform that is not driven by FAANG, advertising models, and "Like" buttons, but instead by artists, collectors, and OSS developers participating in a digital economy: selling and trading tokens, and also exploring ways to steward and maintain that work without solely relying on traditional centralized third-party services.
I'm a Fediverse user and I want to nuke the FAANGs, so I'm fully on board with promoting alternative, decentralized social networks. I just don't believe that adding glorified baseball trading cards to the recipe makes them better or stronger in any way.
I never heard anyone saying that Team Fortress 2 became a better community after it became an online market for ugly digital hats.
> The print is beautiful and hanging on my wall.
Physical: you can view it, it can be stolen.
NFT: you can view it, it can stolen.
> The print won't evaporate when the url suddenly points to a server that was shutdown from lack of payment.
Physical: might burn down/stolen, insurance + security + safety prevents that.
NFT: Host might disappear. Content-addressing solves that.
> I know I bought a print, nobody was trying to trick me into thinking it was the original.
Physical: You can prove you have it because you have it.
NFT: You can prove you have it because your wallet contains it.
> And, most importantly of all, the artist got paid.
Physical: Artist can get paid when it initially got sold
NFT: Artist can get paid when it initially got sold, and can take a piece of each resell thereafter.
https://www.securitymagazine.com/articles/94627-19b-in-crypt...
https://www.infoplease.com/culture-entertainment/art-archite...
Here's another physical asset theft category that says 1/3 americans have experienced - something tells me you're also wrong about how many people have been stolen from as well.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/10/package-theft-how-amazon-goo...
This is why I've muted "NFT" on Twitter. You can't get answers out of proponents without them massively shifting the goal posts.
I agree these comparisons aren't perfect, but I certainly wasn't trying to move the goalposts - I am trying to understand how you've not done just moved the goalposts yourself, though.
Robberies are down from 30 years ago, flat for the past 5. Cybercrime is soaring.
In my 40 years, I've never had someone break into my house and take something and I've never had a house burn down. Yet putting a file on the internet, it will eventually get copied, probably some time in the next 3 months. And I have a bookmarks folder full of once-very-popular sites that are now just completely gone, plus a bunch of still-popular sites that have changed their site layout completely. Hell, it's a bit of a meme that one of the only sites you can count on to never disappear is the god damned original Space Jam movie website.
Is it even fraud if the artist didn't actually... what even? the NFT?
On Hicetnunc.xyz, buying a token on the marketplace automatically deducts 2.5% of sale to the platform (for services rendered), 10-25% to the artist (or whatever they set as royalty amount for the token), and the remainder to the seller. This is enforced via the blockchain contract, i.e. it cannot easily be circumvented on that marketplace (but it can be circumvented via peer-to-peer transfer or an alternative marketplace/contract).
The wallets can all be anonymous; it just sends these tokens to different addresses.
Just like losing the key to an encrypted file.
But what you do get is a guarantee from (a) the author and (b) the fact that prints are reasonably difficult to duplicate that there will only be a limited number in circulation. And this enforced scarcity is what makes it valuable even though it's just a print of the original.
If NFTs could limit duplication of digital art that would be something but right it seems like they are more akin to a payment system like PayPal only psuedo-public.
NFTs do not need to limit duplication; the tokens are already unique, as each is addressable to a different contract hash. This is why, although there are many copies of the CryptoPunks contract for example, there is only one CryptoPunks token that tends to have a market around it[1]. Those tokens are linked with a contract address that has become widely recognized as stemming from the original project.
[1] - https://etherscan.io/token/0xb47e3cd837ddf8e4c57f05d70ab865d...
If you had an image file format that embedded an NFT and every device would refuse to allow copies then that would be something. But right now NFTs seem pointless to me because I can always just copy the underlying image once I see it online.
How so? The author can (and probably does) sell signed prints all the time. How is a print difficult to duplicate?
In limited editions e.g. 50 or 100 as they know that releasing more would reduce scarcity, prices would drop and no-one would buy their art any more.
And the prints are difficult enough to duplicate without having some artistic skill. Infinitely more so then choosing Duplicate on a computer.
Artists in the signed print run business don’t generally run new runs, for the simple reason that they understand the moral contract and more importantly the economic implications: if you do reprint, the value-add of your assertions plummets.
The same artists will usually have other non-numbered or print-on-demand art.
> How is a print difficult to duplicate?
A multi-layer screen print is not trivial to replicate without the original assets for the individual layers, and material information about the inks. That’s like asking how a painting is difficult to duplicate.
You cannot then sell copies of it to someone else. (well you can but not legally.....)
I can of course sell these tokens to others (again, as with signed prints), but if I attempt to copy/clone the tokens and distribute more, I enter into legal/ethical grey area (again, just as with signed prints).
Somewhat related, see MSCHF's latest work:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/art-pranksters-sel...
Which only leads on to the next problem of how you associate the signature with a real human.
Rarity is what dictates price, not only social decisions.
If I make an NFT of my photograph and sell it to someone, what is stopping me from making copies and selling it to someone else again? Or giving it away? Nothing. This will crash the price of an NFT if the NFT's value was dictated by the artwork.
So NFT's are just bitcoin, another scam.
Digital art is worthless, though. It's as you said. There are no original copies, all of them are equivalent. They can be trivially and endlessly copied. Once created, the cost of creating more copies might as well be zero.
It's the artist's labor that's valuable. It's the artists themselves who are scarce.
Put another way: there may not be any change in value between one copy and two copies, but there is a big difference between one copy and zero copies.
Once that initial copy is found, any number of copies can be created and distributed at zero cost. Value is determined by supply and demand. If supply is infinite, value must be zero no matter what the demand is.
They aren't digital prints in any sense of the word.
As the OP mentions, people are selling NFT's with URLs pointing to art without the permission or involvement of the artist. This demonstrates that ownership of an NFT does not "prove" anything about ownership related to the art itself.