Hacker News Reader

Comment by dragontamer | Hacker News Reader

1. Lets say you own an NFT of a picture named "Foobar".

2. I go to the original artist, and buy the original picture / Foobar's copyright from them for $1 million bucks.

3. Now I sue you for illegally distributing my work.

Who wins? Frankly speaking, I'm betting on the court system / classical copyright law in winning. I hypothetically win as far as I can tell.

This isn't even a hypothetical. Copyright allows me to buy the works off of artists. The most common is MPAA / RIAA and other record companies who gain ownership of music. Or Disney Corporation owns the drawings / pictures of Mickey Mouse and not the artists who make the 3d models or pictures.

View on HN

I'm no expert on this, but from what I've seen, most NFTs are as simple as an incremented ID field mapped to your wallet address and stored in a smart contract. You (usually) don't buy any rights to the image in the first place, and what the ID represents is not guaranteed to persist by any part of the agreement. So, if the author kept the copyright to the images I suppose they could sell it and then prevent the NFT owner from displaying the image itself. Seems like a fast way to burn your reputation as an artist or developer.

I would guess that most popular projects license their images under creative commons, and encourage people to copy and share them, so that the original authors can't just overwrite them, since there would be lots of backups and a social consensus as to what each ID represents.

I win because I am not distributing your work. You want to sue the off-chain 3rd party who is actually distributing your work. They would then be required to stop infringing, at which point my NFT becomes worthless, as it now points to a 404.

The only NFT I’ve seen used an IPFS link, so I dug around a bit and it seems IPFS.io (whatever that is) honours the DMCA. That has me mad wondering, what kind of legal safeguards are in place for IPFS content?

ipfs.io hosts a web gateway to content on the IPFS network, it isn't the network itself.

This is arguing against a strawman.

1.) Increasingly, most savvy NFT projects provide, and savvy buyers demand, explicit IP rights. For example, here are the IP terms for Bored Ape Yacht Club (one of the top NFT projects in the space): https://boredapeyachtclub.com/#/terms

Note that BAYC grants the NFT holder not only a license to use and re-sell the NFT, but the right to commercially exploit and create derivatives of the image.

I would not buy any NFT that did not come with an explicit license. Note that most NFT marketplaces do provide a default license [0].

2.) To the extent that an artist created and sold an NFT of their original work, and then re-sold the copyright to a third party (you), I suspect the copyright system has a concept of an implicit license, i.e. the NFT holder cannot create derivative works or exploit the NFT commercially, but his ownership and re-sale of the NFT is likely non-infringing, so I'm betting you lose. You hopefully asked the artist for a representation that no rights had previously been granted, so you perhaps have a claim against the artist for breaching that representation, if made.

[0] https://www.natlawreview.com/article/nft-license-breakdown-e...

The BAYC license does not grant copyright. Note that it also doesnt say that the license that is granted is exclusive, nor does it say its irrevocable.

The actual copyright holder for the art can absolutely sell the copyright to someone who isnt the NFT holder. That person would be free to revoke or restrict the NFT license.

I suppose this depends on whatever license the buyer and original IP owner agreed to during the original sale. Assuming the purchase included a license to distribute the NFT (share the image, resell the NFT, etc), you'd likely have to continue honoring that after purchasing the IP.

Not sure what type of licensing NFT sites like OpenSea/etc. use.

> I suppose this depends on whatever license the buyer and original IP owner agreed to during the original sale.

What agreement? People are just buying NFTs without reading any contracts or signing anything.

Bored Ape Yacht Club has recently flipped CryptoPunks to become the #1 NFT "avatar" project.

Why? Well, multiple factors, but I believe a huge one is because the license terms (https://boredapeyachtclub.com/#/terms) provide for broad rights to commercially exploit your NFT and create derivative works.

This has led to celebrities purchasing them en masse and Universal Music Group even creating a new band based on BAYC avatars: https://nftnow.com/news/bored-ape-yacht-club-band-announced-...

So yes, I think savvy buyers are very much paying attention to license terms, and as the space matures, having a clear IP license will be table stakes, and a permissive and broad IP license, a valuable element that people pay attention to.

You are right that many people have ignored this to date, but the userbase will become more savvy and the platforms will mature so that these distinctions are clearer to buyers.

Buying a copyright duet let you retroactively own all previous distributions. In your case the original nft was distributed before you bought the copyright. That distribution was it there and legal, your law suit would have no basis.

who is “you”? it’s a public key. good luck suing a public key.

nfts are still largely a grift

> who is “you”?

Anyone who uses the "Foobar" picture reachable within my legal jurisdiction. Which would include any NFT "owners" who are trading some crazy token that has no claims over copyright.

Lets say Alice (currently the NFT owner) gets sued by me for her use of "Foobar" without my permission. Upon receipt of the documents, she sells the NFT to Bob and uses the money to pay for legal bills. Did Bob in fact buy anything useful from Alice? Bob may not even know that a legal proceeding is happening.

Later, when Bob realizes he's been conned, he sells the NFT to someone else again. But I sue Bob as well for any damages associated with using the Foobar picture without my permission. Maybe Bob keeps passing the NFT to other people, but its clear that the NFT is fully meaningless at this point (at least, to Alice and Bob). Other users may keep getting tricked, but that doesn't change the fact that the NFT affords no legal rights to this entire exercise.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com