25th August 2021 > > NFTs again.

tl;dr

There are significant copyright issues around non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

Market Snap

Market Wrap

Oh no, $50k is breached. Woe is us, my friends, woe is us.

Occasional Series – Political hypocrisy

What do Alok Sharma, Chairman of COP26, Allegra Stratton, Boris Johnson’s climate spokeswoman and Dr Gail Bradbrook, one of the founders of that other Marxist organisation, Extinction Rebellion have in common?

Too easy I know but it is true – they all drive diesel cars.

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – NFTs and copyright

With the proviso that a detailed analysis of this topic should come from a lawyer, and the proviso that all situations can be uniquely different, there are some broad guidelines that one can draw.

When buying an NFT, that gives the purchaser ownership of that property. The NFT acts as a digital certificate of ownership, with the added advantage of being clearly displayed on the blockchain.

What it does not do – unless specified to do so under the terms of sale – is to give copyright to the new owner. Copyright is retained by the creator of the NFT unless contracted otherwise.

In theory, that means that owners of NFTs – unless they also own the copyright – are unable to display that NFT on public (website) platforms. They are unable to reproduce it, and they are unable to make it available to others, in a legal not a practical sense.

These theoretical rules are of course being broken by the day – any secondary sale of any NFT without ownership of the copyright, on such platforms as OpenSea, could be challenged in a court of law. Which if enforced, would immediately put all the recent NFT marketplaces out of business overnight, and cause all sorts of other potential ownership rights problems.

On a practical level, that is an unlikely scenario – the value of all NFTs would drop overnight, until copyright issues were resolved. It is in no-one’s interest to go down this route.

But this does mean is that in a nascent area such as NFTs, there is still a whole heap of issues which are yet to be thought through in any real depth. And sometimes people act in ways just to cause disruption.

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC)

Perhaps I did get a little too excited about that brief foray above $50k. This graph – showing the GBTC premium, or as it now stands, the discount – is one that we should all keep in mind.

The stable discount despite recent positive price action is an important signal. Or possibly it is simply a response to illiquidity in the secondary market. Pays yer money, takes yer choice.

I wouldn’t go so far as to run any technical analysis on this graph but feel free if you think it will help.