and if we say their lawyers too, then maybe it will get done.
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Can I sell the right to receive those royalties, like with music publishing?
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Or even, perhaps, and I’m just spitballing here, sell —ahem, rent— the right to copy it?
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As long as I’m buying the painting just sell me the royalty rights too, I’ll give you an extra hundred bucks
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It won’t be very long before NFTs are seen as a tax on people who are bad with money.
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I saw someone had switched out the art for some NFTs they had minted, which isn’t supposed to be possible (apparently it is, at least for some NFTs…), but it’s not yet clear that any of the images are offline completely/permanently yet (there just might be some temporary issues), which I guess is why people are still pretending any of this means anything.
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Charles Stross nailed it. Economics 2.0, baby.
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So how does paying taxes on the increase in value of the asset work for NFTs.
Previously if you bought an expensive piece of artwork (that you hope will increase in value) but didn’t want to pay taxes, you kept it “offshore” on a boat or “pre-customs” storage. And there it sits accumulating “value” but you don’t have to pay any taxes on it until formally “imported”.
How does this work for NFTs? Does the “asset” have to be kept on an offshore server?
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From what I’ve been able to gather, storing the images themselves on the blockchain would be prohibitively expensive even for this ludicrous scheme, so what is typically stored is a simple URL. This can be an IPFS address for the file itself, but it’s more frequently an address that simply serves up a JSON file with the metadata for the actual image the NFT was minted for, and that also frequently just contains a URL to the actual image’s location (be it on a specific server or in IPFS). In the case of the NFT being a series of chained URLs, if any of the servers in that chain go down, the file goes away as well. More fun is that the URL storage approach is also susceptible to domain takeovers or transfers of ownership, at which point the new owner could just put whatever file they wanted at the location specified by the NFT, or the person who sold the NFT could just screw over the buyer by putting the file on a server they own and then changing it themselves at a later date.
IPFS (which is a distributed file hosting network that could probably best be summarized as “Mastodon, but for files”) isn’t all that much more resilient either. While it’s distributed, it does still ultimately rely on individual servers for storage, and if there are no servers in the network indicating that they are a canonical host for a file, it can eventually be dropped from the network because nobody else is technically required to supply it. So it ultimately has the same issue of being brittle to hosting failures or closures that regular web server URLs do.
The whole thing is an absurdly stupid house of cards MLM pyramid scheme that also happens to have a carbon footprint the literal size of a small European nation and I hate it.
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Here’s the dull, sad, unexplained fact: by the time you might start trying to make money, this bubble will have burst and you’ll be sitting on a bunch of works no one wants to buy wondering why you missed the boat. Because the people with money who were able to make money will have moved on, leaving behind a whole lot of folks hoping they, too, can make a quick buck and with no one to fill their bank vaults. The rich only want status… unless you’re a famous artist, you have nothing to offer them.
It’s a sham. It’s the 90’s web bubble, the 2000’s housing bubble, and on and on and on. It WILL come tumbling down. It’s not the future, it’s another get-rich-quick scheme.
And yes, being a struggling artist sucks. The modern world is geared towards pandering to capitalists and bankers, and no longer cares about anyone else. The market for writers in particular has gone dry. It used to be possible to make a decent living while never being famous at all or having a best seller, but those days are long over. But all artists struggle these days, hence having to turn to kickstarters and patreon to make ends meet.
You could, if you want, play this game. But unless you’re already rich and famous, you’re not going to win it.
Yes, Godin is rich. And that matters why? Because the OTHER side of the digital coin is ALSO being pushed by multi-millionaires and billionaires, and also fossil fuel production owners who see big bucks in producing the energy needed for these things. Which rich person you going to believe? The industrial techno douche bros who love surveillance capitalism and digital monopolies? The oil companies and their friends in the coal industry?
I’m going with my gut on this. It’s another crock. I’ve seen plenty of them in my lifetime to recognize one at this point.
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CA tried something like that. A federal court said no dice.
I’d say congress needs to get to work, but apparently that is mostly unpossible.
Welcome to Wall Street v2.1.7
I have some sympathy to the idea that revenues for artists should / could also come from downstream sales. Architects have discovered something similar: over here in Europe, they often go to lengths to prevent alteration of their designs on the grounds of copyright (they sadly don’t always succeed but then in other cases some crazy architects who have been known for their leaky and overall flawed constructions have prevented the addition of rain gutters–on the grounds of copyright). I think any investor in their right mind, private or public, should always make sure a clause in the contract will prevent meddling of the architect with future modifications.
As with an architect reserving some rights to the building, an artist reserving some rights to their piece should make the object that much cheaper. After all, the buyer does not enjoy 100% of their rights to deal with the object as they see fit. One could imagine this playing out as a zero-sum game in the sense that what is shaved off the original selling price is, on average, what might be gained by the artist by reserving the right to future royalties. But then again, for the artist it’s probably sometimes a good idea not having to wait for an uncertain future with possible income streams but collect the money at once.
As for the method at hand to get artists into the loop—NFTs—I think that
NFTs should be outlawed as soon as possible,
just as public gambling is restricted in many, many jurisdictions.
Like cryptocurrency, NFTs are nothing but a craze, a gaming vehicle for the rich. NFTs and cryptocurrency draw their value directly from spent fuel (often coal, gas, oil), spent resources (e.g. even to build a solar or wind farm), atmospheric pollution, increased production of toxic e-waste, environmental damages (e.g. dams with all their adjacent infrastructure, including streets and traffic to the hydroelectric plants and the data centers in the Canadian wilderness), and contribution to global warming.
NFTs and cryptocurrency benefit the already-rich and / or illicit and illegal purposes at the expense of every single individual on the planet (including aquatic and terrestrial plants and animals), most markedly the poorer ones who have less of an opportunity to seek out alternative places to live. To a small (very small but still) part the fires in Siberia, the Amazon, California, and Australia were also caused (among many, many other things) by cryptocurrency. All the while, all that cryptocurrency has done for mankind was to widen the gap (and make life a little more comfortable for people who already had quite comfortable lives to start with).
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If that is a thing you value, contracts are how you handle it. They have a negligible overhead and there is a long history of their use in courts. I’m not sold on the idea that anyone’s work should forever continue to feed money back to them, but we have had the tech for a few thousand years.
Supposedly that has been right around the corner since the beginning. It should get here right around the same time as consumer grade cold fusion.
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Personally I’m not too worried. Right now it seems NFTs affect people with too much money to know what to do with it. Unless NFTs start drifting down to where there are “mutual funds” investing in NFTs with people’s 401k, who cares if the bottom drops out eventually?
I’m more worried that the bottom won’t drop out soon enough.
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It’s why I told folks I know who are artists on a few discord servers I’m on if you didn’t get in this early then don’t. Such Beanie Baby hype trains are only best to be in early and getting out early is the only option. Yes I know it’s scummy to promote that attitude but if you’re hard pressed for cash I’m not gonna tell anyone to not hustle. Seriously, if rich people want to be foolish and dole out millions for NFTs I say more artists ought to take it and then bail.
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I’m guessing you mostly mean fiction writers here? In my experience, you can fly under the radar as a non-fiction writer and do quite well, but it’s a lot harder to do with fiction (which is too bad because I know a lot of people who deserve way more than they’re getting from their work).
Having said that, I’m seeing a lot of folks my circle getting really excited about NFTs and I just don’t get it. It seems like little more than digital baseball cards to me. A handful of people might get really rich out of this, but for the most part, these are going to linger in some digital box in the basement until they’re accidentally thrown away or sold at yard sale for virtually nothing.
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