Wednesday, July 6, 2022

Kuwentong Bangtan: NFT and Jack in the Box (2 of 2)

Continiuing the conversation on NFTs, Bangtan and the creative process in this digital age including ownership and intellectual property.

From Jamie Bautista:  Not a fan of NFTs as someone who saw how speculative markets almost destroyed the comic industry in the 90s. Turning art into scarce “collectibles” as a form of short term earning and investment based purely on demand for the collectibility or scarcity of something is a bubble waiting to burst. I remember people buying comics in Mylar bags to resell them later but never reading the actual comic. The “collectibility” or scarcity for someone to pay more for it later is all NFTs bring to the table. Personally, as an artist, I’m staying away from it. Not judging artists who do it to gain income, but considering the only value it adds to the art is only there if someone will buy it for a higher price due to the artificial scarcity, it reduces art to just a speculative investment instrument (which can lose money and have no intrinsic value if no one later on is willing to pay more to buy it).

From Earl Valdez: NFT is basically unique digital content that is uniquely yours.

Closest analogy is art: the original Mona Lisa is in the Louvre. You may have copies of it framed and printed and hanged on your wall but its value is not like the original painting. The Mona Lisa is non-fungible, all the duplicates are fungible.
Now with digital content, there's a way to secure authenticity. Blockchain technology secures and authenticates content which assures that your NFT is unique and original.
With JITB, it's basically selling a CD without a CD. That can only be non-fungible if it is owned as a unique digital content like no other person has.

From Jamie Bautista: With an NFT, the art itself isn’t actually made non-fungible. People can still make exact copies of it and distribute it. What is made non-fungible is the ownership of the digital item. Basically, it’s a digital proof of ownership. But unlike the Mona Lisa, where it’s uniqueness comes from it being physical (like the texture of the canvas, the actual brushstroke details a high res photo can’t replicate), a digital good can always have perfect copies of it. All an NFT does is tell everyone “guys, the file this NFT points to (as NFTs don’t hold the actual files themselves, just a link to them) we all agree is one of a kind and is listed in the blockchain. And whoever is listed as owning it on the blockchain, they are the owner of this ‘original’ file.” An NFT does not make the digital item more or less accessible or even copy-proof. It’s a certificate of authenticity basically so people can agree that one particular version of a file is the “original” or is “unique”. The value comes from people wanting to buy that certificate for the right of “ownership” (and not of the copyright of intellectual property BTW. Just the ownership of that specific digital file.)

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