If they're getting into NFT it's to sell shovels to the speculators.

If you think about it, then this fits Amazons's existing business exactly: To provide a marketplace for people who buy things at cost prices and then sell them for a higher price.

If they really want to lean into the reputation they are getting for being a platform for counterfeits and scams then NFTs are the next logical step

counterfeits on Amazon? Are you kidding me? sarcastic smile

Seriously though, it's easy to verify if a NFT is genuine - one of the features of Blockchain tech.

I don’t know what you mean by genuine, non-counterfeit?

You can check that a token exists on chain, but that tells you nothing about whether the person who issued the token owns the copyright to the work. Ie, no guarantees of authenticity.

If e-book and amazon video/music licenses were portable, resellable AND platform agnostic (can use my license and exercise it with a different content host to certify I am allowed to download that content), I would buy a bunch of them.

I currently have no reason to want to own an NFT, and never "buy" content from amazon because it is locked to my account and has no real permanence.

This would certainly be a killer app for NFTs, but I doubt Amazon is willing to cede enough control to actually do this.

NFTs as a decentralized DRM scheme would have the same weaknesses as traditional DRM systems. Centralization is also literally the entire point of DRM, so no one has an incentive to try to make it work.

That's amazing. If intellectual property licensing worked like this, it would be a lot more bearable.

Someone is going to make a hundred billion dollar business doing this.

Those first few years kissing the asses of IP conglomerates enough to get them to try it will be horrible, and then when you prove success competition will be fierce as there is no moat: not a business I would want to start. But I'd certainly be a customer.

Less Amazon than the content owners: NFTs give them no additional revenue, still have the same hosting costs, and dramatically increase the odds of a compromise leaking their material permanently.

> NFTs give them no additional revenue

Portable digital assets could be priced higher and would have more demand.

> still have the same hosting costs

Do content owners have to pay amazon hosting costs? I thought that was included in their platform fee.

> dramatically increase the odds of a compromise leaking their material permanently

The odds of leak are 100% already, so this isn't true.

Right now, a company gives their movie to a reseller and gets a fraction of a sale price. The reseller pays for hosting out of their percentage.

NFTs don’t help with storage because blockchains are both inefficient and global so you still need to pay someone to host the actual media files and only give them to people with valid keys.

Worse from a rights-holder’s perspective, blockchains don’t allow you to remove content. That means that any time something gets compromised, you have valid keys floating around with no way to remove them. It’s true that leaks happen anyway but there are some key differences: these are always the best quality and they look like legitimate usage so it’s harder to block or track the way they go after torrent users. Anything which reduces risk will increase the number of people bootlegging by a hefty margin.

You can do things like, say, having the key in the blockchain be what you use to request a temporary key with lots of rate-limiting but if you’re building the infrastructure for a separate login and distribution system anyway, it comes back to the question of what benefit you get from the extra cost and risk of using NFTs rather than just using that system. If the answer isn’t “a lot more money”, nobody is going to jump on a system which is less reliable and harder to use.

While that would be amazing to have, the problem isn't lack of technology (or more specifically blockchain technology). Amazon could very easily set up a marketplace to facilitate transfer of ebooks, movies and more to other accounts. They could also issue "tokens" for redemption on other platforms. All this is possible with good old fashioned CRUD.

Hmm, I would value these more if they weren't managed within an amazon-controlled database, but you're right that they could offer a lot of the value of this with a centralized solution if they wanted to.

Just replying to myself. I find it amusing to be downvoted so much, yet sparking so much discussion. It seems like NFTs evoke strong reactions from both pro and anti camps. Obviously they are an extremely disruptive tech, especially in the way we view ownership and also they derail the whole "cryptocurrencies are not useful for anything" argument. So they disrupt not only those against cryptocurrency, but also those who are entrenched in cryptocurrency that does not have the ability to support NFTs

Does it really make sense? NFTs have not been proven to be anything except hype (really well selling hype for a while, but nothing but hype nonetheless).

NFT's are baseball cards that go away the second the servers storing the actual data go away. sure you have record that you own the token that confers no actual ownership (physical, copyright, or trademark.) setting on the underlying blockchain assuming that blockchain continues to operate but the data itself is still as ephemeral as the server hosting it.

NFTs don't exist, though.

That's like saying "ownership of intangible goods doesn't exist".

Yes.