I almost made this joke myself, but I actually have some friends born and raised there and they swear it’s a nice city outside of what most people know about it. So out of respect for them, I left the low hanging fruit on the tree. 
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As I said in the rest of the post:
I’ve heard the same. Vegas isn’t only The Strip.
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Unfortunately, I don’t think this will ever be true. It was said of nuclear power in the 1950s that it will be “too cheap to meter”. The truth is power needs grow as fast or faster as production, and it will always be a limited resource. We’ll always need to decide where it should and shouldn’t go as a society. If it was infinite (or effectively so) then great- let the libertarians play with their new electronic gold standard all they want. When it’s killing the planet my grandchildren need to live on, well, now we need to have some words about it.
I think in the broad strokes we are in agreement here though. I just can’t pass up a chance to take BitCoin down a peg.
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To create the NFT, the NFT creator uploads the image to create a blockchain record. That is copying, and it is a violation of the copyright owner’s exclusive right to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies, under 17 USC section 106(1).
The NFT itself may be a derivative work.
IAAL, and I practice IP law.
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Yet, you felt the need to tell @MalevolentPixy that the scenario she discussed, which is very much happening, is unlikely?
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I’m sorry my post was confusing. I was responding to her last point–the idea that “if you want to lay claim to your own art, you’ve got an uphill battle to prove it’s even yours.”
Proving ownership of the original work is not the same as proving ownership of an NFT. Artists are not losing any right in their original work–including the right to sue the person who copied it onto the blockchain. Because it is so easy to copy any digital work into the blockchain, the blockchain itself will be of very little evidentiary value in demonstrating that the owner of the NFT is in fact the owner of any important, legally protected right in the original work. And, again, although we are in the first flush of this grift, the law will catch up.
Is that clearer?
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Power… “We’ll always need to decide where it should and shouldn’t go as a society.”
In the USA the answer to that is “let the market decide” , don’t see that changing soon enough. Yes, I’m sure we are in agreement; I grew up being able to see Andromeda as a naked eye object, that is my esthetic but clearly there are more who find Las Vegas beautiful. And blockchain in general, blurgh. The NFT thing is exciting a lot of people…the art friendly AM radio morning show I listen to had a discussion about it today and I think there are those who feel it is offers advantages to artists. I don’t but,value judgements …
EDIT: a comma
That remains to be seen, though, since this is new enough to not have gone to court yet. But at this point, anyone can claim ownership via these NFTs and profit off of work they did not create and do not own.
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If you wanna get technical, the Strip’s outside Vegas.
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You still have to hash it out in court which is the original and which is the copy.
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I’m sure the people with the money to hire lawyers (i.e. not most independent artists) will find a way to turn disputes over NFTs to their advantage, finding even more ways to make sure that the actual creator of a work makes as little money as possible from the sale and re-sale of their works.
In these cases I’m pretty sure they’ll take the approach of saying that the NFT was never really related to the artist’s work, detach it from the NFT and attach some other artist’s stolen work. Having your cake and eating it, too (see Fox’s claim that they’re only offering entertainment in court while marketing themselves as news) is a favourite prerogative of the lords of late-stage capitalism. The law tends to support their claims.
Also, while an artist can sue and win under the scenario you describe (assuming he or she can afford to) I’m not sure how they can collect. Do they get ownership of the NFT? Can they alter its terms (e.g. to get a piece of every future sale) or delete it? How does that work in the context on multiple unregulated markets?
In practical terms this just reproduces and exacerbates the existing dysfunctional fine art regime, where only superstar artists (or their estates) and deep-pocketed corporations like DC stand a chance of winning against IP thieves and wealthy degenerate collectors who are more concerned with ownership of art than they are with its aesthetic pleasures.
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Again, we don’t know this yet, because it’s not been tested in court.
We DO know that people are claiming work done by others, profiting off it. And when large corporations do it, it’s far harder for independent artist to seek recompense for that. This seems only likely to exacerbate that problem.
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I confess to not being as up on the technical side of this as I probably should be, but I don’t think that an NFT works that way. My understanding is that creating an NFT with a particular image marries the NFT to that image. If it could easily be replaced with a different image, I’m not sure what even notional value the NFT would have. And I think it’s the case that any such replacement would be evident in the blockchain regardless.
So, I think there are two questions buried in this–a hard one and an easy one. The answer to the easy one is that, as long as you can identify the defendant and that defendant isn’t judgment proof, the artist could collect damages (including statutory damages of up to $30,000) for infringement, and probably also secure an injunction against the further distribution of the work. Copyright owners can also recover costs and attorney’s fees.
The hard question is whether the defendant or defendants would be identifiable. The blockchain is public, but as I understand it, the users’ identities aren’t.
Other than distaste, I’m not sure that artists have much of a claim against wealthy degenerate collectors who buy art for speculation and hoarding rather than display. Speaking only for myself, I like to collect art (and although I’m probably irredeemably degenerate, I’m certainly not wealthy)–but even so, I have a preference for collecting and displaying original art rather than prints.
I thought Vegas ran off of the Hoover Dam. Isn’t that relatively carbon neutral?
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Not entirely, no, but it is part of it’s power grid…
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Not necessarily. The NFT isn’t embedded in the image steganographically, for example. There’s nothing (including the mechanism that compensates the artist a portion of future re-sales) preventing the current holder from detaching the image itself from the NFT. That action could likely be recorded in the blockchain ledger as a transaction note.
See my earlier comment:
Depends on the blockchain and currency/token, but in this case (trying to replicate the shady bonded-warehouse laundering/tax evasion art trade) most likely they’re anonymous. There is probably a record of the original creator of the token somewhere in the on-line exchange/market, but those places aren’t exactly known for complying with a given jurisdiction’s laws.
We’re talking about stolen/copyright-infringing in this case. But the point is not that artists shouldn’t make money from their work, the point is that (per my earlier quote above) obsessive collectors care very little about the pieces of art (or baseball cards or Hummel figurines, etc.) themselves but care very much about owning them.
You sound like someone who collects art mainly for its aesthetic pleasures, which I don’t think anyone finds distasteful. I own a couple of expensive pieces of art, but I keep them mainly because they’re pretty and well-executed and also because they invoke deep associations with my family and my personal interests. If they didn’t have those, I’d sell them to someone who’d appreciate them more.
The larger point is that, despite claims by the techies who developed NFTs, this is just another way to cut the vast majority of independent artists (i.e. ones who can’t afford to pay an IP lawyer’s fees) out of realising any real revenue from their own work. Put another way:
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The millions of cars and other carbon producers in the city don’t.
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Since “Bitcoin miners” are competing against each other, if electric power were available in unlimited amounts, the mining algorithm would require unlimited amounts of power to maintain the blockchain
It’s like the “airplane on a treadmill” problem—actually it’s a lot like that, Bitcoin is a virtual airplane on a virtual treadmill using infinite energy to keep the plane from moving
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hydropower changes the albedo of the land, generally absorbing more energy than the unflooded land would have. This contributes to global warming irrespective of carbon balance. There are also issues with increased water vapour in the atmosphere with hydropower reservoirs, etc…
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