The NFT is the legally agreed upon ledger to track rights that were originally signed away — in a way that can trace their authenticity and ease transactions.
The problem is that NFTs are deeds and a deed is only as good as the issuer. NFTs are the crypto side of the interface, but we’re currently missing the wetware side — trusted providers.
I think the long term vision is:
- artist signs over rights to digital art house
- art house sells the NFT
- valid licenses are signed by wallet privkey as proof
- DRM traces signature against blockchain
(I’m not sure I agree, but I can see uses for digital deeds — once you have reputable providers.)
People are paying billions for NFT's without that in place though, and I'm not sure how many of the people buying and selling them are aware of or have even thought about that scenario.
So what do we take from that?
> because people were selling tokens of content that did not belong to them
There seems to be some lack of social consensus about whether an NFT is "supposed" to be this or is "fake" if it is not.
I am curious if any/all of these NFT market platforms make it clear in their UIs that the "rules" are you can only sell NFT's referencing content you have rights to?
But in particular, I don't think there's usually any UI about what rights you are supposed to be buying, if any, in the content referenced when you buy an NFT? Different people seem to have different assumptions.
This is one aspect of the whole thing being a ridiculous mess that many of us don't understand why people are spending billions on.
I think this story is not just "bad actors" it's, well, more-or-less intentional ambiguity on the social expectations and/or legal requirements in use of NFTs. Where do sellers on most market places promise that they own the content? Where do they agree they are selling the buyer any rights? If nowhere, then how are they even violating any rules if they don't and aren't? I think they aren't?
But the profit comes from the ambiguity, so the ambiguity is more or less intentional. Making NFTs seem like something they aren't, if you spelled it all out it would ruin the mystery, if the seller has to promise they own the rights, and agree to transfer them, in some legally enforceable way... then what's the NFT for? And why am I paying more for it than I would the legal purchase of ownership of bad art or slighty amusing cartoons in the first place?