My way of thinking is an NFT is a shitcoin with supply 1 and smallest denomination 1.

Ah, see, I ususually skip over NFT nonsense because of the sheer number of WHY and WHO it brings up… but now and then it’s summed up nicely.

What prevents this and maintains the value of the work is that there are legal and social norms enforced through a vast network of institutions (galleries, museums, collectors, art fairs) that ensure that there will never be more than 1 actual edition of the work, or 2 or 3, whatever it is the number never changes after it is set, and minting more editions would be professional suicide, and the network of institutions would never allow or recognize it even if an artist tried it.

Lawrence Lessig's book Code developed the argument that any combination of social norms, legal structures/enforcement, and code or infrastructure can function as law, and sanction or foster certain behaviour and markets. "Code is law" was a clever observation and a bit of a revelation, but the NFT crowd seem to believe that it's enough or that it has more value than the social norms and contract law of the existing art world. It's engineering mindset hubris.

There's an attempt now to work social norms into the NFT space and enforce etiquette around "right-clicking", but convincing collectors of paintings that they could continue to collect photography was less of a challenge than convincing generations raised on BitTorrent, DRM wars, and authorless memes to introduce false scarcity into online digital abundance.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Work_of_Art_in_the_Age_of_... [1] https://artblart.com/tag/transparency-in-light-box/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Destroyed_Room:_B-Sides_an...

The "non-fungible" part refers only to the receipt, not the original work.

Right but a receipt of what? A receipt, evidence, or proof, that a transaction took place. But a transaction of what? One party got money. What did the other party get? A proof that s/he paid the money. For what? For the proof that s/he paid the money ... for the proof that s/he paid the money for the proof that ... LOL.

Makes me think that I should make an NFT out of Brooklyn Bridge. That might gain lots of fame and thus lots of value?

Your last sentence hit the nail straight on the head. You can in fact make a Brooklyn Bridge NFT and you would hardly be alone.

Heck you can mint as many NFTs as you like of any image you own the copyright of :)

That hasn't stopped loads of NFTs of copyrighted images being minted ofc.

And if NFT does not give you the copyright I might sell the copyright or license it to 3rd parties who could not care less about you having an NFT somehow "associated" with it.

I guess the key is what does it mean for an NFT to be "associated" with anything.

It's mind-boggling

It's a terrible analogy from the start, don't blame me.

My point is that if you buy a new record from an artist you generally expect it to be original music that’s the product of creativity. But a lot of artists release things that are perceived by many to be very derivative, unoriginal, and not creative.

No, you expect it to be one of hundreds to hundreds of thousands of exact copies that anyone else could buy regardless of whether you own a copy or not, and that will usually be repressed if the supply runs dry. It's the product of a record pressing/CD replication machine more than anything else; no creative or original work goes into producing copy 67,904 out of 100,000. There is no expectation that you are paying for original work. The money you spend might go into funding original work, indirectly, but what you're paying for is a copy, and that's also what you generally expect it to be.

If consumers generally each bought the only copy of the records they own, it might have been more relevant.

That one seems like a classic supply and demand thing. Make too many, sell none

Having said that, that does actually seem to be the business model in this wave. At least for the ones people are heavily pushing that get on on my radar. Maybe not hues but "accessories" (procedurally generated png layers, flattened)

But because anybody else can sell anybody else very similar NFTs it looks like the supply is infinite.

The only differentiator then is who is the seller, right? But how can the value of a thing be different based on who sells it?

People only want to pay for the NFT, because it is supposed to represent a desirable piece of art. The only person who has the moral authority to sell it is the artist. Anyone can create an NFT that "links" to some piece of art they found online, but if I am not the artist, why would anyone pay me for it?

Additionally of course, there are artists whose work is more desired, so they command a premium over other artists.

If I tried to create such an NFT from someone else's art that would be fraud if I don't own the copyright to that art.

Is that how it works in practice? Do NFTs (typically) include immutable text which clearly spells out what rights are transferred to the buyer of the NFT? And because the text of the NFT is in the blockchain which can not easily be forged, courts will accept that fact as evidence of a binding contract?

This can be included immutably on-chain. Mostly it is done off-chain, which is ok, because enforcement of any such license would happen off-chain and in courts anyway. Frequently, no license details are given at all, which may also be ok, because people who collect fine art aren't doing it for the use value ("I need a stock photo for my landing page"), they are doing it because they feel good about being an art collector. In that sense, very limited use-rights are actually required.

Specifically, what use rights does an NFT grant?

For photographs (and I have a small gallery of them collected over the years in art festivals and galleries), they're hanging on my wall... though I can't publicly display them (that's part of the copyright).

If I sell a print of a digital image (that I captured with a camera) and I sell a NFT of the same digital image, what are the differences in the use rights that the two buyers have?

If the digital image, hosted on a server that I maintain goes offline (I didn't pay my network solutions bill and someone else buys the domain), what does does the NFT retain rights to?

However, I believe in the US, there is no right to even download a copy of a file on the internet for purely personal reasons. I could see an NFT buyer successfully argue in court that this right is implied, even if not specified.

What happens if the file goes offline? I would think that this will not effect an existing license that you have previously granted. Of course, the buyer may struggle to make use of their license rights if they did not retain a copy of the image themselves.

Do you have any examples of an NFT that grant rights accompanied by TOS terms for minting the NFT that affirm that it is the original artist or someone who is authorized to do so who is creating it?

> However, I believe in the US, there is no right to even download a copy of a file on the internet for purely personal reasons.

There is de minimis which isn't so much a right but rather a "this is beneath the concern of the law".

As to the US aspect, every country that is a signatory of the Berne Convention ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention ) recognizes the minimum standard for protection which includes the right to to make replications or display to the public that is held as part of copyright.

For an NFT, would a baseball card be an acceptable comparison for what it represents in the real world? To that end, I would contend that the same thing happens to it when the player that it represents (there is no ownership conveyed in a baseball card beyond the card itself) leaves the game.

But baseball cards also have physicality. They are close to our world we can see them and turn them around. Physicality gives them desirable properties like easily carrying them around, no computer required. A physical thing is unique. Any sequence of bits on the other hand can always be copied.

That's what I fathomed. What I don't get is why would anybody pay anything for them

But consider a very successful real world use case: trading cards. As NFTs, these digital cards are limited by contract on their respective blockchain such that infinite copies cannot be printed - they are limited edition. Scraps of cardboard for this rookie or that player only have ever had value to people who collect them - now the same sort of thing exists in the digital realm, without the risk of losing the physical collection in a house fire. It's less the artwork that is valuable, but the NFT itself.

Another valid use case is Patreon-like support of artists (especially in the music industry). As it is now, tens of thousands of people contribute money monthly to their favorite artists via platforms like Patreon often in exchange for perks like early releases to tracks or works in progress. NFTs can represent the same sort of thing, except that at some point in the future these early released tracks - or really - the possession of a fact of support for a band during their career as an NFT - has value amongst other fans. In some cases possessing these things can become backstage passes to a band at a concert.

Much of the NFT space right now is a cash grab. That doesn't mean valid use cases won't emerge.

So. Digital art can be replicated, and they may or may not convey ownership. And then you immediately turn around, replace "digital art" with "digital cards" and "perks" and pretend that this is now somehow different just because you're using NFTs for literally the same thing, but called a different name.

> That doesn't mean valid use cases won't emerge.

It means exactly that: valid use cases will not emerge because of what NFTs are.