this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2023
545 points (95.2% liked)
Technology
59658 readers
3035 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Obligatory rather funny If NFTs Were Honest | Honest Ads https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sG_v4bb2e4k which sets this out, a year ago
I know i'm really late to the party, but this video gave me an idea how blockchains could actually be useful for art. Not to sign a digital image to your name, that's bullshit. But to link an actual piece of art to you as a certificate of ownership. So in case it gets stolen, you can prove you're the real owner. This requires first time entries to be verified by certified experts, but after that you're good to go. You would need to solve a bunch of problems, like what happens when someone dies and the objects are inherited, or what if you buy it, but the owner doesn't update the chain or makes a mistake, etc. You would probably need a group of mods/experts who can amend the entries. But then you could more easily contact the owner, manage reproduction rights and in general make art theft less attractive, because all art dealers can easily check the current state.
This was actually the original idea of non-fungible tokens, but because you need special legislation to tie an object to this digital receipt (there is nothing legally tying one thing to the other), they just skipped over it completely and said the NFT itself was the commodity, which is why they could only do it for digital art with the a web link. (we could, for example, see this more useful for a title to a car or house)
In fact, many NFTs don't even contain any language about copyright or licensing, they don't even attempt to pretend that the NFT holder owns the copyright. The owner of the NFT in these cases only owns the NFT, and not the copyright. Of course, you have to transfer the copyright separately from transferring the NFT, which makes this whole thing redundant for buying/selling on secondary markets, but they could have at least tried to pretend they could.