Originally published at: DC warning letter about using comic characters in NFTs is being sold as an NFT | Boing Boing
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What’s an NFT?
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This is like your ill-tempered next door neighbor hurling dung over your fence… then you using it to enrich your gardening compost.
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Some kind of blockchain-based nonsense that has enabled people to charge large amounts of money for “ownership” of a digital image that is otherwise indistinguishable from any other copy of that digital image.
Best summary of the practice I’ve heard is that people are selling a concept, “like beanie babies without the beans.” Except way worse for the environment.
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Thank you for that. And thanks to @Brainspore as well. I had been aware of them, but I wasn’t used to seeing them called NFTs and the article didn’t define the acronym as is common practice.
It seems like you don’t sell the image itself, just the rights to say it’s yours. So it’s more like a Deed or a Title than actual posession of a tangable item, right?
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Except that a Deed or a Title imply ownership of a tangible possession like a building or a car. This is more like a digital version of a trading card that implies ownership of nothing but itself.
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Yes, provoke a giant corporation’s lawyers. That’s bound to go well.
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NFTs are a complete scam that don’t actually signify anything. I could write on a piece of paper “I own the Mona Lisa” and it would have exactly as much validity as an NFT, but without the environmental disaster.
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I’m not saying it is a Deed or Title (which assert ownership of a physical thing), I said ‘like’ meaning “similar to”. Which is to say it’s an official recording of ownership rather than having actual hands on posession of an item.
I guess you could counter that they (NFTs) can be used for asserting ownership of things you can’t even posess (or download a digital copy of), so that would make them even more different than a title or deed.
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Yves Klein would love this.
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Things like NFTs are only as ‘official’ as people choose to recognize and be bound by them.
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Yeah it’s kind of like those deeds people sell for property on the moon, except that those deeds didn’t take obscene amounts of energy to produce and the moon is an actual physical object rather than an abstract concept.
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DC is really saying don’t steal our shit that we stole [or severely underpaid] from some artist in the first place.
You’re welcome.
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An environmentally disastrous vehicle for money laundering.
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I tend to think of it as a self-referential “certificate of authenticity” where there’s not even the implication that the seller owns, or has any rights to, the image to which it’s attached.
But ultimately it’s just a way of causing more speculation in Ethereum.
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Tech slang for “grift with extra global warming”.
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It’s much more like a dog peeing on a tree to mark its territory, and somehow expecting the logger or landowner will respect the pee smell.
These have never been tested in a courtroom. They’re not contracts. They’re claims with no basis in law, or even fact.
People are greedily snapping them up hoping they’ll have meaning (and value) in the future. But they’re speculating on something that doesn’t even exist yet, and has no logical reason to be successful.
What they really are is the next iteration of digital grift.
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People like collecting things. Beanie Baby collecting remains very active. A pokemon card is a piece of worthless cardboard yet people want a certified original over a nearly indistinguishable replica. I doubt NFT collectibles are going away, no matter how dumb anyone thinks it is to collect them.
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