While I’m not a fan of NFTs this does somewhat weaken the proposition that any “rights” cannot be sold with NFTs because IIRC this is the status quo in meatspace art purchases too.
They are pulling a bait and switch.
Is AI art (eg. VQGAN+CLIP stuff) public domain? Doesn't the seed image and text prompt constitute artistic work?
How about using photoshop smart features like autofilling?
At what point is the threshold placed?
Define algorithmically generated? There are certainly tools for randomizing the mix of image elements that are present in a piece of art, and combining them, but does that only apply if I used a computer to do it? What if I draw 300 reference images, photocopy them, cut them out, and sit down with a set of dice and tables, and make collages using glue?
Does the inclusion of random noise as a processing step in creating digital art count as algorithmically generated?
What if I use a custom programmed brush that simulates the randomness of physical brush bristles to simulate in a digital painting?
How very decentralized /s
With that said, there are some NFTs that do attempt to tie property/copyright to the token ownership.
Also whenever people talk about ownership in regards to copyright, it's a flag that they probably don't know what they are talking about.
Iirc cdpa 1988 in the UK holds it to be copyright of the authors of the program. But I'd be surprised if the law was a comfortable fit for practice 30 years on, or that it had been tested much in court.
You are buying the rights, but they're rights that exist in a pseudo-legal system that has no enforcement and isn't recognized by any existing legal authority. Some kind of enforcement could exist one day though.
For instance, it's possible that your house in a "metaverse" might only display art for the NFTs that it verifies you own.
I checked out the Doctor Who NFT thing after Team 17 was teaming up with the people behind that thing, and the domain where the NFT metadata and images are being hosted was due to expire next summer. They didn't even splurge on a five-year registration for the domain. Hopefully auto-renewals don't stop working.
If anything, metaverse should allow you to see all works of art as if they were the real thing, all the time, for "free"*
* assuming the efforts of building and maintaining the infrastructure are properly compensated
Aren't virtual economies old news by now? Plenty of games and game networks have accomplished this with virtual goods.
The 'metaverse' stuff doesn't scare me personally (where this concept could become widespread). I don't buy for a second that it's going to be a big deal where it will be anything more than a niche glorified game lobby.
A separate question is would the copyright holder win a lawsuit or DMCA takedown request? I don't know
> A claim based on a mechanical weaving process that randomly produces irregular shapes in the fabric without any discernible pattern.
That is so specific that I have to believe there was a court case where someone attempted to claim copyright for that kind of process.
But to answer your question to define algorithmically generated, the requirement is that “whether the ‘work’ is basically one of human authorship, with the computer [or other device] merely being an assisting instrument, or whether the traditional elements of authorship in the work (literary, artistic, or musical expression or elements of selection, arrangement, etc.) were actually conceived and executed not by man but by a machine.”
(Citation to: https://www.copyright.gov/comp3/chap300/ch300-copyrightable-..., see §313.2).
Buying an NFT is buying the right to the NFT. It's not buying the right to the art.
Even if NFTs were backed by law, so that if I use your private key to transfer the NFT to me you would be able to use the law to come after me for theft, what I stole from you wasn't the rights to the art.
What the grandparent post was complaining about was that it's not even the rights to the art.
If you buy the rights to the ape, then you can sell copies.
I suppose the holder of an NFT can sell a "copy NFT". Maybe that's the next thing. Selling an NFT of an NFT of an NFT of a Beatles song. With a holder chain making sure that whoever minted the NFT-of-NFT at the time did hold the parent NFT.
That last paragraph is of course exactly the kind of nonsense that is at the core of NFT, so you should expect these derivative NFTs to start becoming a product soon. If you can sell NFTs-of-art, why not NFTs-of-NFTs?
Anyone can sell copies of the Mona Lisa (because expired copyright). Anyone can make NFTs of it, too. Why would NFTs minted by the Louvre be more real?
To me, NFT is performance art. It makes you think about intangible ownership. But outside of being performance art it's worthless.
That's what I heard once anyhow.
Doesn't mean this can't be done, but in each case I've looked at, granting of rights (and which specific rights do we even mean?) is not happening.
Further more there is no obligation for anyone to do anything with the image linked to the NFT your the holder of.
Resolution 7,479 × 11,146, or 83 megapixels.
From that page:
The official position taken by the Wikimedia Foundation is that "faithful reproductions of two-dimensional public domain works of art are public domain". This photographic reproduction is therefore also considered to be in the public domain in the United States. In other jurisdictions, re-use of this content may be restricted; see Reuse of PD-Art photographs for details.
It may well be, but unless the WMF created the piece, it has no standing to declare this. I may well be reading too much into things, but I know also that the WMF has taken "interesting" legal positions on art (a famous recent photo set up by a wildlife photographer where a curious primate, IIRC, wandered up to the camera and depressed the shutter).
And the monkey selfie you mention was actually not obvious legally one way or the other. I believe the human eventually won, but it was down to the details.
In order for something to be copyrightable it needs to have minimal "threshold of originality" to it. In the monkey copyright case the photo clearly had. In the photo I linked to? Much less clearly so.
The EU (because Mona Lisa) is summarized as "The test for the threshold of originality is in the European Union whether the work is the author's own intellectual creation". (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_of_originality).
One would have a hard time arguing that framing a painting perfectly in the viewfinder is "the author's own intellectual creation".
In the US it's "at least some minimal degree of creativity".
But yes, both could be circumvented by injecting the painting equivalent of "paper towns", I suppose.
But in any case any of these people could start selling copies:
https://jeffhaltrechtphotoblog.com/2015/09/01/selfie-mayhem-...
But of course we could then worry about what a court would say about a "no photos, please" sign and whether it's a binding contract that signs over any copyright over photos in the place (uh, doubtful).
It's an interesting legal area, and I don't reject the idea you mentioned of de facto re-copyright as a whole. I just don't think it applies to Mona Lisa specifically, for these reasons.
But you should also remember that there's a difference between "You're not allowed" and "You are not able" to take a photo.
Unless you have a contract signing away the copyright to the photo, all the establishment can do is ask you to leave after you've already taken the photo.
And I highly doubt a checkbox ToS when you bought the ticket will be considered informed consent of reassignment of copyright.
Sorry, you're right there - my phrasing was definitely ambiguous. Like you say, there was a lot of nuance. But Wikipedia (initially contributors, then I believe, the Foundation itself) was very aggressive from the outset with "Screw you, no copyright to be found here!" which is an "interesting" stance to take when it's not at all so clearcut.
It does mean that.
Again, this is a different problem. One can imagine a service with a seignorage fee to verify such things when an NFT is minted after which that particular question is settled. The point of it being on a blockchain would then be subsequent ease of sale, transfer etc.
What's to stop the buyer unbundling the property which is worth something (the copyright) from the pointless NFT?
> The public domain consists of all the creative work to which no exclusive intellectual property rights apply[0]
Think of it this way. Imagine I wrote some code, and when I ran it it generated a piece of art. Surely I would have IP rights over the artwork? Otherwise you could make the same argument about art made with a somehow automatic paintbrush I built.
I hope I’m not talking at cross-purposes here and using a completely different definition of “public domain” was was intended, apologies if this is the case.
Now, the individual visual components of the weapons could have a copyright but the computationally assemblaged work based on the components would not because they've just run a job to "generate all the permutations".
For something like No Man's Sky, which is extremely procedurally generated I reckon it's very grey and they could try to make a case but the actual world they generated for people to play in would not be protected by copright. I don't think it's well tested in court.
In the case of the monkeys the hat, the basemonkey, and sunglasses could have a copyright but the assembled monkeys generated by a computer with no creativity would not. But it's a derivative work of things with copyright so that aspect becomes super grey.
The UK government issued a call for views to figure this area out and try to legislate it. Hopefully something useful comes of it. https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/artificial-intel...
As you say, it seems like there’s a significant grey area that needs to be resolved, and I could see it being quite difficult to figure out where to draw the line in practice.
By service, I think you mean company, now I have to trust said company, also I need to check NFT is minted by company I trust, and that I trust the identifier of said company on the NFT. Now if it turns out the company wasn't doing a good job, what happens then, do the NFT's get revoked, by whom, what are the remedies and the compensation process?
All this gets bumped off chain fairly quickly with a hand wave whenever discussed, which quickly puts the block chain solution into question. If the NFT only works when minted and managed by trusted party, then is what we really need is data interoperability rather than blockchain. And even there, NFT's don't actually contain any on-chain or off-chain data expressing what the semantics of the NFT is.
