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Comment by originalcvk | Hacker News Reader

For real estate lawyers, a full understanding of all the laws is important. For someone who might want to buy a house, a rough understanding is sufficient. That's why I provide both. Not everybody needs to know or care about the exact details in order to decide it is worth owning a house. But if they are interested, they can learn. I hope providing both sides of it is seen as useful in that light - it is not self-contradictory to make broad analogies that are useful, then explain exactly in detail where those analogies break down.

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> Just like a deed conveys ownership of a house at some address, the token conveys ownership of that media.

This is just a lie. The token doesn’t convey ownership of then media. There is no rough understanding by which this is true.

> I make it clear exactly what rights you and others have over the media, which is basically none.

Which you acknowledge here.

This isn’t a matter of exact details that aren’t important to a buyer.

If you tell someone that an NFT conveys ownership of the media, you are lying to them and participating in a con.

The fact that you later contradict that statement, doesn’t change the fact that you lied.

> This is just a lie. The token doesn’t convey ownership of then media. There is no rough understanding by which this is true.

The debate around this is pretty somewhat tiresome. Yes, you have to buy into the believe that the token represents the media, but it's as good a definition as any because all ways we talk colloquially about "owning" a JPEG are simply not the same as owning a chair.

- Copyright is just a set of limited legal rights granted to someone temporarily by certain jurisdictions. It's not the same thing as owning something, which is why we were laughing at the "you wouldn't steal a car" ads in the 2000s.

- Actual ownership means having access to a copy of the bytes, which is not perceived as meaningful, and only valuable to the extend that access is otherwise arbitrarily restricted.

- You can choose to believe in the artificial scarcity of a certificate of ownership.

> The debate around this is pretty somewhat tiresome. Yes, you have to buy into the believe that the token represents the media

This is fine. There is no problem with a club of people who choose to play a game in which they agree that a token has a particular meaning.

The rest of us can point out that it doesn’t mean the same thing outside that club of believers.

Thing is actually assigning IP rights to the owner of the NFT should be trivial as some projects have done. That it’s not done or the IP rights granted are explicitly limited suggests people get that and want to retain ownership of the rights whilst selling the token.

If you own a Meebit NFT it’s actually the extant legal system that determines what that means.

https://meebits.larvalabs.com/meebits/termsandconditions

And note you don’t own the media and that what owning the NFT means can change.

“(b) Ownership. (i) When you purchase a Meebit, you own only the NFT, not any associated Art. Each Meebit is associated with a non-fungible token (an “NFT”) on the Ethereum blockchain. When you acquire a Meebit, you own the NFT, not the associated Art, or any other Meebits Materials (as that term is defined below), or any Third Party IP.”

Not really sure what point you are trying to make. With Meebits, you don’t own anything other than the token itself.

That’s what I said and the point I was making is that this is a bog standard contract.

State employed officials with guns will show up and remove you from a house if you are living in it without permission from the person who owns the deed. That is ownership.

There is no thing that another person can do regarding a piece of art backed by an NFT that you own that will cause state employees with guns to show up to stop them.

Please, explain to me what legal rights an NFT-holder asserts over someone that claims ownership of your token. Do any countries respect the blockchain enough to take you seriously?

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