Some crypto enthusiasts apparently thought owning a book was owning the rights to it

THAT! is the problem. Disney is not paying the royalties the authors are contractually entitled to.

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Absolutely a problem, but it’s a dispute over contractual obligations rather than a question of who owns the copyright to the novels.

If you want to have total creative freedom and legal ownership over your novel then you’ll have to write something that isn’t based on Disney/Lucasfilm’s IP.

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I was under the impression that the Wu-Tang album actually came with the rights to it too. They even said whoever bought it could share it, sell it to the world, whatever they want, but there was only going to be one person who could buy the official release.

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The more I learned about NFTs, the less I realized there actually was to it. It’s not even the proverbial empty suit - it’s a picture of an empty suit. Having worked in the video game industry, the rush to come up with NFT-based game schemes is particularly of interest - it’s completely obvious that every single person making such proposals is either a cynical scammer or has absolutely no idea what they’re talking about (or both), because there are no proposed uses that make any sort of sense.

But the whole phenomenon entirely relies on most people not understanding NFTs, so you get a whole lot of people (the scammers and the scammed) misrepresenting what they can do and what they are.

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Ah the good old “Napster defense”.

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It’s not even that.

It’s a “digital receipt for the payload string in the URL field of the NFT.”

There’s no rights to anything, no ownership of anything, and nothing other than the knowledge that you were the first one to point to that string on that particular blockchain.

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Exactly this. Owning an NFT is exactly like owning a Post-it note with a URL written on it.

Except you can at least use the Post-it as toilet paper if you’re really desperate, and Post-its generate less atmospheric carbon.

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ISTR that there was also an issue with Disney not agreeing to even negotiate unless the authors signed an NDA.

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Yeah that sounds like a total dick move.

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I read somewhere that as some ecoins shift to mining processes that aren’t as vulnerable(?) to mass GPUs, miners are shifting their arrays to cranking out EFTs.

:man_shrugging:

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Can we start using “crypto enthusiast” to describe people we find to be not smart?

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I heard their argument went: “We bought the assets, but not the liabilities”

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Unlike an NFT, you cannot just right-click on a book.

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Here’s a video primer as to what NFTs are. It’s a longish video, but JSH is trying to make things as clear as possible. But yeah, you’re getting the rights to a unique hash represented by whatever piece of art is attached to it. You don’t actually own the rights to anything but the hash.

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Surely on the Star Wars thing… the problem is that Disney has deprecated the Expanded Universe and will therefore never allow that material to be reprinted, so that means no more royalties for the authors?

You mock it, but how else in our glorious libertarian future are 10-year old coal miners going to buy heroin?

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It’s not about the book. It’s about the pump and dump of the cryptocoin they are pushing. A few million euros is chump change compared to what they stand to make. Given the current price and market cap, if they can convince enough chumps that the coin is worth (say) a dollar, they’ll be billionaires.

No, Disney’s position was that they bought the IP but not responsibilities entailed in the contracts that went with it. They seem to have settled the issue with at least some of the authors last year though.

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More a rare copy of an incredibly common book that must have seen dozens of print runs in English alone. You can buy a generic second hand for some loose change.

Just because there is a mechanism to perform a purchase, and then a sale, does that prove there was ever a “thing” that was owned?

If I convened a comp.sci. class and assigned the students to create apps that did nothing at all except commit wire fraud, how would the results be different from NFT’s :thinking:

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