It's as old as law itself, isn't it? From the Code of Hammurabi (translation from wikipedia):
> If a merchant should give silver to a trading agent for an investment venture, and he [the trading agent] incurs a loss on his journeys, he shall return silver to the merchant in the amount of the capital sum.
Not quite applicable, but kind of? If I give silver to Sony for a movie and Sony loses the rights to that movie, I want my damn silver back.
You are powerless to accomplish anything in an adverserial situation unless you can mobilize men with weapons to do your bidding. These days it is the court systems that authorize and compel the restoration of your property with the threat of depravation of liberty or purchasing power of the defendant.
This can be summarized as appealing to a higher power — your example is the courts, an alternative is the public reputation / free market. Without a 3rd party institution to appeal to, the parties must reconcile between themselves in a conflict e.g. violence. Same principle applies often in macro/micro contexts.
Even the public reputation and free market system reduces ultimately to threat of violence, due to the fact that bank balances are maintained by state-licensed entities. It's just one more level of abstraction from state violence, but it is still always there.
Whether it’s bank balances or pitchforks, the result is a conflict. Whether both parties are able to delegate judgement to a higher power determines the type of resolution. In the case where parties recognize a higher power it can be resolved without true violence (bloodshed)
There's no technical or legal reason that the word "purchase" doesn't imply an irrevocable, transferable license (for one person at a time), as well as the requirement that the "seller" makes the licensed good indefinitely available to license holders (for a fee appropriate to cost of doing so).
If they don't like that, don't call it a purchase. Anything less is just eroding the meaning of the word.
I suppose I could have put ‘sales’ in quotes. And it’s not how I think things should be. It’s how they are. Read the terms next time you ‘buy’ a digital product.
How do otherwise intelligent people come to believe things this stupid? An NFT is a glorified receipt, the most it can possibly do is prove you purchased something but you can already do that with regular fucking receipts and credit card statements.
Seriously, I want to know. How did this happen to you? Was your common sense dazzled by math?
Please don't take HN threads into hellish generic flamewars. We've been through this a thousand times already. Pouring out a whole bunch more gasoline and setting it on fire is exactly what you should not be doing here. We want curious conversation.
Personal attack is also completely off limits, and you did it more than once in this thread. No more of this, please.
Edit: it turns out that you've been breaking the site guidelines so badly and so repeatedly that I've banned the account.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll use HN as intended in the future. Among other things, that means no more comments remotely like these:
I can't believe I'm going to defend NFTs, but ... _if_ copyright law were satisfied that you aren't infringing if you purchased perpetual access to a copy--digital or otherwise--then "a glorified receipt" could be all that was needed _if_ the system honoured users with a right to access, on any system on which it was available, for cost, a work that has been legally purchased.
In USA, I can't see why proof of purchase and TPB wouldn't be enough. Platform issues don't negate the rights you purchased.
When you buy stuff on these digital stores, you agree to pay for an indefinite license to the content. So it can be pulled at any time.
Why would these stores use NFTs attached to ownership licenses when they could just reword their ToS to include ownership. They don’t want to sell ownership to begin with so they would never use NFTs either.
As usual, Crypto shills push these extremely complicated technical solutions to problems which have very simple economic/legal solutions. The problem here is that companies are not selling ownership. NFTs do nothing for this because companies are still not selling ownership.
You could even have the content shared over public BitTorrent networks, encrypted with a symmetric key and then store a personalised asymmetric decryption key (the symmetric key encrypted using the owner wallets public key, ensuring only the current owner can derive it from the public NFT data) in the NFT. You would re-compute this asymmetric key for the new owner during the TransferNFT function and store it in the contract.
Yeah, the symmetric key would probably leak quickly, and the content decrypted and shared, the point here is to make the system so convenient and simple that it discourages piracy, which you can never fully beat anyway.
Yugalabs[0] assign copyright license to whoever owns the NFT on the chain forever.
So if someone mints a NFT, they get a perpetual license to use it however they like. The downside is if they lose the NFT for any reason such as theft, they lose the license as well.
Other NFT projects of yugalabs store data on chain or use a separate storage chain built for permanence. This basically means they cannot take the content down once they have uploaded it and attached it to a NFT.
However this doesn't solve anything unless corporations are forced to accept it as the only way to sell content.
One big problem it may solve for corporations is uniqueness and validation of all license in existence through a ledger. If a company sells their content exclusively via NFT, they can take advantage of immutable receipt system and built in programming capabilities to embed royalties on transfer. This would make it hard for people to sell their copies without giving companies a cut. Legally, that is. Nothing stops them from ripping off a copy and selling it but it would be easy to prove it is invalid and enforce via legal system.
0] Yugalabs is a big NFT IP company valued at 4 billion. They are behind monkey jpegs which are called BAYC.
And I want to know what drives a person like you to post toxic comments like this.
Why not just say "An NFT is a glorified receipt, the most it can possibly do is prove you purchased something but you can already do that with a regular receipt." without the rude and spiteful attitude?
I thought this "end of history" narrative would be dead by now. It's incredibly naive to think that major wars are a thing of the past. The trade/commerce argument against the political viability of war has been made and debunked in the past. WWI should have been the nail in that coffin but I guess the idea is too appealing to give up.
> In The Great Illusion, Angell's primary thesis was, in the words of historian James Joll, that "the economic cost of war was so great that no one could possibly hope to gain by starting a war the consequences of which would be so disastrous."[4] For that reason, a general European war was very unlikely to start, and if it did, it would not last long.
Countries have largely stopped declaring war even when they send troops to overthrow a county. It's the kind of distiction the only matters in international politics.
Well if that was throwntoday's point, it's a distinction without a difference. The Korean War particularly, despite not being officially declared as a war, came disturbingly close to going nuclear.
The TL;DW/TL;DR is that boost-phase missile defense, deemed infeasible years ago, may now be practical thanks to advances in technology (rockets, electronics and sensors, lasers, etc)
In the context of fighting a war, Kessler Syndrome is a meme. It reduces the expected lifespan of a satellite, but that only becomes strategically relevant if the new lifespan of your satellites is shorter than the war is expected to last and satellites are being destroyed faster than they can be replenished. America is rapidly developing the ability to launch a ton of new satellites very quickly.
Of course the post-war aftermath would be deeply regrettable. But it always is.
Depends on severity. Some orbits could become contamintaed enough to destroy satellites in hours if countrys are tossing around anti satellite weapons.
An attack 80+ years ago does not underscore the need for any reform today, nor for that matter does an attack 20+ years ago. Not unless you think nothing has changed between then and now, which would be silly. Introspection and reform after both those attacks happened years ago. It may be the case that we do need additional reform today, but that isn't evidenced by attacks which occurred generation[s] ago.
> If a merchant should give silver to a trading agent for an investment venture, and he [the trading agent] incurs a loss on his journeys, he shall return silver to the merchant in the amount of the capital sum.
Not quite applicable, but kind of? If I give silver to Sony for a movie and Sony loses the rights to that movie, I want my damn silver back.