Any takes on what is copyrightable here in terms of the contract itself (I’m sure the CODE IS LAW bros would stroke out over this)? All of the “art” for this is generated from the code and is on chain. Could I just copy it, change the drawing function slightly so it displays this,
and then let people buy / sell / merge in a battle to acquire the biggest cock?
“Honey, I just paid $780,000 for the biggest cock on the block(chain)!” seems like the drop we would have gotten if Beeple did this instead of Pak, and people would have paid just as much.
Ethereum will either maintain its dominance after the upgrade is complete, or it will fail in the face of a competitor, or the market is big enough for multiple level 1 networks to thrive, or some other thing will happen. I have nfi which, so I have holdings in both ETH and several competing level 1 networks, plus a few level 2. If any one of them succeeds (like real world succeeds), then the returns will probably be so huge that whatever I lose on the also-rans won’t matter. The potential losses with any of them is limited to the small amounts of money I throw at them, while the potential upside is effectively unbounded.
Since the art is generated from the contract itself on Art Blocks, what do you actually own when you buy the NFT? More importantly than “who owns what when they buy this NFT?” though, which I think is sort of a different issue, what are the boundaries for what would be considered derivative works? You’ll see a lot of responses like this
which I broadly and sarcastically refer to as BLOCKCHAIN or CODE IS LAW. Not only is the issue this person addresses a red herring (thread is about copyright, not provenance), there are laws that will apply in some way, in some jurisdictions to crypto and copyrights despite a lot of naive people in this space thinking that nothing applies or they can make up the rules.
Ianal but I suspect nobody really knows. Say you do what you say and sell the tokens on an exchange domiciled in Hong Kong. I sue you where? We’re both in USA but you could argue the infringement happened in HK so I have to sue there and gl with that. Also for what damages? You sold stuff for 1000 shitcoins, how much can I say that cost me? I think defending copyright in this space may well be intractable.
Right, these are all good points, and I suspect that the reality is that small fish (artists, startups) have no meaningful copyright enforcement while Megacorps with Big Law armies on retainer could easily find a way to throw wrenches into the blockchain. Would not surprise me if they are filing inane copyrights / patents now that Boomers at the USPTO will rubberstamp.
this is a very uneducated big picture take, but isn’t all of this just on a bubble until it becomes big enough to actually threaten the US dollar as international currency? as it closes in i would fully expect the US to go the way of China and just outright ban transactions. dozens of nations depend on the US dollar’s supremacy, there’s no way we just let that go, right?
1: Cryptocurrencies are terrible at being money. They will always be orders of magnitude slower and more expensive to settle than any central bank issued fiat. This is an immutable characteristic of blockchain architecture. They can be better than they are (maybe much!) but will always be comparatively terrible.
Some of the newer blockchains are already close to matching Visa for speed and volume of transactions, with the potential to exceed it. That’s probably one of the reasons why most of the credit card companies are increasingly getting involved with crypto.
It’s also not obvious that cryptocurrencies are necessarily terrible at being money. It is true that the first generation deflationary ones are, but stablecoins are increasingly being used successfully as nothing more than just plain money. There’s an entire booming blockchain with a $27 billion market cap devoted to just issuing tokens pegged to real world currencies.
I can buy unlimited amounts of bitcoin for cash at the poker table with an irreversible transaction that will complete in an average of ~10mins for <$1. I see people regularly using fiat transactions for the same purpose and I’m pretty sure that they pay a lot more in fees, with more risk and $1-2k/d limits.
I’m still crypto-skeptical and not a true believer, but I’ve become a lot more willing to think it has a chance at success after spending recent months looking closer at the current state of the crypto world. Most of what I thought I knew about it was old information that didn’t reflect present realities.
