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Comment by mediumdeviation | Hacker News Reader

But you can already license your IP using a contract or a license, and that contract can be inked in paper or done digitally. You can even give exclusive license or transfer your rights. The only difference using the blockchain is, well, the blockchain.

This is an even less interesting use of the blockchain than Bitcoin - at least with Bitcoin there is no longer a central authority needed to prevent double spending. Here the blockchain is facilitating a transaction that can already be done without some authority to recognize it.

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I don't care about bored apes or jpeg nfts in general, and don't know how true it is that you receive ownership of the ip.

But if it worked that way, then the concept is pretty cool. You say "you can already license..." yeah, but this is one click stuff and you're good to go. What you're saying is slow lawyer stuff and a fully manual process.

Of course this one click to purchase IP could be done centralized. But decentralized can add transparency, instead of relying on paper trail and companies that can go defunct.

Literally every stock photo site already does this.

But you can't turn around and sell that stock art to someone else.

You could if they changed the wording of the license being transferred.

Okay, so they don't actually already do it, but they could do it.

How would you keep track of who currently has ownership? How do you make sure I don't sell ownership to 5 people, or keep using it myself? Do I need to hire a lawyer each time?

Yes, this can be done without the blockchain. But also, does it matter to you if the code is in SQL or the blockchain? The blockchain is just a technology. (I do think the environmental impact is worth considering, for the record.)

Ultimately these are problems that just do not need solving. There is no real world use case to sell and transfer ownership of a stock photo multiple times.

Will it save lives? No.

But experimenting with copyright law is fascinating. It’s like saying, 20 years ago, that concepts like Creative Commons solves no real world use case.

I don’t think 5 years from now BAYC will matter. I do think, however, experimentation with intellectual property, copyright and ownership will.

Problem is it’s 1% interesting experimentation and then 99% scams, criminal activity, and destroying the planet.

I find that AI generated imagery is a much more interesting experimentation on copyright. Rather than trying to introduce scarcity to digital items, AI will destroy ownership entirely as anyone could generate their own brand new stock images on demand.

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