NFTs are completely divorced from copyright.
Copyright: The actual legal rights to the image or text
NFTs: A photo of your receipt from Barnes & Nobel, posted on your My Space blog.
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I agree, that’s why I said they’re worse than useless.
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The NFTs are expected to sell for $200,000 to $500,000.
And be worth between $200,000 and $500,000 less than that.
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Andy Warhol was one of the guest stars of the official launch of the Amiga 1000 along with Debbie Harry. The whole event in glorious potatovision is here:
Commodore’s marketing magic did the hard work of killing off the machine.
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In this case it would give an art museum or collector the rights to display the images in an art exhibition. I hate NFTs though and digital art has been sold for decades without any need for NFTs.
These are quite unique works by a well known artist, MOMA should be interested in adding these to their collection. They probably won’t as they’ll be overpriced NFTs.
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Me: I bet he had a bunch of stuff on the Amiga. I look around and read “Among the box load of disks, a few are tantalizingly inscribed “Drink me” and “Love, Keith” with a paint marker. The disks look to be in an Amiga format but have yet to be analyzed.”
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Would it though? I read the Christies site which only mentions the NFTs, no mention of any rights outside of the standard NFT right to…own a receipt to a URL that may or may not point in the future to the image referenced (and that anyone with an internet connection can look at).
Places like Christies (IMO) are extremely excited for folks to believe that there is more going on here than that, but it certainly looks like the emperor is buck naked. To sum up, [citation needed].
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NFTs aside, happy to see the Amiga get a shout out. The Amiga(s) bootstrapped my entire professional career. I will always have a warm place in my heart for that crazy hardware-from-the-future.
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Well, Keith Harring’s estate are involved so I believe so.
The auction listing says “this work is unique and accompanied by an NFT”. They are selling the artwork and also the NFT. They could do this without any NFT being required and they should.
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That’s still probably the most coherent explanation for how the grift works.
Commodore was a pretty small company at the time, and actually did a pretty good job with the Amiga rollout and marketing. It was well known, and sold pretty well for a niche manufacturer. But they couldn’t keep up the pace and improve the machines fast enough - Apple was guilty of that as well. They were sticking that same 7mhz 680000 in machines for seven freakin’ years. I loved my Amigas but toward the end they just couldn’t compete. Not with the RnD that was pouring into the PC market and the bizarre and terrible decisions of Commodore management.
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Even assuming they’re selling the work alongside an NFT of the work, it still leaves the question of what, exactly, is being sold when they sell the work. The copyright to the work? A license? If so, what kind of license?
That said, based on the auction site, it doesn’t really seem like they’re selling anything but the NFT. The website does at least reference a license by the Keith Haring Foundation that accompanies the NFT purchase. It’s a bit of a mess, tho:
Ownership of Artwork . Reference herein to your ownership of the Artwork means your exclusive ownership of the authenticated NFT that constitutes the digital original of the Artwork, as such ownership is recorded on the applicable blockchain. Only a person or entity with the legal right to access and control the cryptocurrency address or account to which the Artwork is assigned on the blockchain will qualify hereunder as an owner of the Artwork.
This appears to be saying that “The NFT is the art, and if you own the NFT you own the art.” Now anyone with two microchips to rub togethter knows that the “digital original” of these Keith Haring images is ipso-facto not the NFT, so this all reads a bit like mumbo jumbo. Also, later, it explicitly says this:
Reserved Rights . The Ownership Rights do not apply to or include any of the following items of intellectual property (the “Reserved Rights”) and all of the copyrights, trademark rights, patent rights, and other rights of reproduction, usage, and/or exploitation therein are retained and reserved by us, as our exclusive property: (i) the Image as displayed by the NFT constituting the Artwork and the copyright in the original digital artwork image and data created by the Artist; (ii) the programming, algorithms, and code used to generate the Image, and the on-chain smart contract, software code, scripts, and/or data constituting and/or implementing the applicable NFT; and (iii) the Artist Identification. The Reserved Rights are, and at all times will remain, our exclusive property, and all rights in the intellectual property to which the Reserved Rights apply that are not expressly granted herein are reserved to us, including, without limitation, all copyrights, patent rights, trademark rights, publicity/personality rights, and other intellectual-property rights.
TL;DR: buying the NFT gives you the ownership of one (1) NFT associated with a Keith Haring image, and nothing else. Also, the NFT itself is Keith Haring art because we say it is.
(Disclaimer: IANAL)
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The site says clearly says they selling “the artwork accompanied by an NFT”. There is a clear distinction between the artwork and the NFT in that quote.
There is a history of digital art being sold before NFTs. Museums such as Moma have digital art in their collection. They also own other ephemeral artworks like Sol Le Witt wall drawings.
For a.really extreme example there is Tino Seghal who sells work that involve no material and that can be restaged but not documented in any way including by writing a description. I don’t believe he even allows contracts.
There’s plenty of reading material on the topic if you’re interested in learning more.
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And then the site goes ahead and says, explicitly, that the artwork is the NFT (in the referenced license).
Performance art is weird. (Aside, I’d be interested in seeing this form of ownership get tested in court.)
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Commodore was a money making machine in the early 1980s, but it never had a long term strategy; it just wanted to be the last one standing Rather than invest in new machines (hell even a new BASIC for the C64 was too much to ask), they just kept cutting prices and rewarding their executives.
When Commodore ended up with the Amiga (in good part just to spite Jack Tramiel who had just gone to Atari), they had already shafted all the passionate independent Commodore dealers by concentrating on selling boxes to the big retailing chains at a massive discount. They had a truly ground-breaking computer on their hands, but no network of enthusiastic businesses who understood why it was so different.
So it didn’t sell as well as it deserved, and that meant they didn’t have the funds to invest in genuinely next generation Amigas which meant we put up with a series of increasingly desperate kludges. Even when AGA came along in 1992, it lacked many of the features that had been planned for AAA as far back as 1988 and the Hombre chipsets never went beyond vapourware.
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The information of Keith Haring Foundation website deifne the “artwork” as including both the image and the NFT.
The rights of purchaser are listed which like I said originally includes the right to exhibit the work. It isn’t really that different from the sale of any other digital artwork, instllation, or other emphemeral work just with a shitty energy wasting blockchain component added on.
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