Traditional Visual Still Artists

The artist who draws or paints on canvas or paper, can take very high resolution photos, and sell prints for some amount of money. That same artist may decide to sell the original painting for a fairly decent sum of money. Every artist is different, and some are lucky enough to never NEED to sell those originals.

Similarly, a film photographer can sell a first process photo along with the negative, after making sufficiently high resolution copies.

If an artist holds their own copyright, in addition to selling the original art, they might also sell prints of their art, or even digital downloads of their art. If lucky, they can sell limited and non-exclusive usage rights to someone else.

If that artist did the work for hire, or in a publishing arrangement, often the publisher owns the copyright, but the artist can still sell the original. There are many artists who use this as a survival strategy for supplemental income.

An original piece of art is unique, and distinct from prints or reproductions.

Digital artists

An artist that does art directly through a computer, via tablet, digitizer, or digital camera, does not have an “original” to sell. Every copy is literally identical. An artist might try to hold back the highest resolution version of their work, but giving that to someone else at all is not provably different from giving that person a copy of the highest resolution. For artists who were forced to use computers instead of physical media, they don’t have an “original” to sell.

Defining Non-Fungible Token

Fungible

Paper money is fungible. What “fungible” means is something can be swapped or switched without loss. If two people have a US$10 bill, and I (for some reason) snuck up behind them and swapped their bills, no harm has been caused. Both people still have US$10, and unless they are very particular, they would never even notice that a swap took place.

Similarly, if two people buy a print run of the same piece of art, and if I (what monster am I) snuck up and swapped their prints with each-other, they still have the same thing. They wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.

Anything that can be sold, and is unique is “non-fungible”. Brand new products are fungible (unless they are personalized), but used ones are not.

Token

A Token is a placeholder. Those US$10 bills are tokens. Two of them are equivalent to $US20, and can be traded in for a US$20 bill. No value is lost, because bills are just a token of the value.

A few grams of gold is not a token. That is a rare metal that has a value, and that can be traded for bills, or a token of that value.

Blockchain

A blockchain is nothing more than a distributed ledger where each entry is cryptographically signed. Each entry has a value and a description. That description IS THE TOKEN. Because of the way the blockchain ledger works, a signed ledger entry and description are uniquely identifiable.

If the description itself is also unique, then the entry itself can be considered a Non-Fungible Token (NFT).

What NFT Were Supposed To Do

Okay, so we have Digital artists who do not have “originals” that are able to be sold. We have people who want to collect “original art” that have money, and maybe want to support the artist, too.

This is where NFT was supposed to save the day. An artist pays for someone to add their art onto the “blockchain”, and then the artist has an “NFT” to sell of their art. Only the blockchain entry itself is the “NFT”, and the description points to the art. As the holder of an “NFT” one can use the blockchain to prove they are the owner of that “NFT”, and by stretching the imagination, “the original of a digital art”.

What NFT Actually Did

First, nothing. It was a weird new idea, and nobody cared. Artists had never heard of it, and only “Crypto-Currency” enthusiasts had any idea of what it was, and most of them had the legal idea wrong anyway.

Then came Apes, er the Bored Ape Yacht Club. Some enthusiasts got together and put a “procedurally generated” collection of Ape pictures up as “NFT"s. This specific collection, included additional perks, including the copyright to that specific ape, and exclusive club membership.

This made the news, a lot, and it also gave many folk the false impression that “NFT” of art automatically meant “copyright” for that art. Those people were quite AI (confident, but wrong).

Partly because of the newness, novelty, and exclusive club membership, the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT collection sold, all in, for nearly a billion US dollars. But then, each ended up re-selling to new owners for even more money. Celebrities bought and sold, and this made the news cycle on the Apes, and NFTs generally, much longer.

And Thus, The Jackals Came

If there’s money to be made, criminals will show up.

There is no governing body to verify that a ledger entry on the blockchain was actually authorized by the actual holder of a copyright or the original artist. So, many pieces of art that had cycled through the Internet a few times went up as “NFTs”, and people bought them.

A simple crime, really. Pay some $50 to register some random download as an NFT, and presumably, someone verifies that the same art isn’t already an NFT, then hit up some of the boards were people want to “invest” in an NFT with an offer to sell this “original meme” for a few hundred dollars.

Not all MEMEs sold were stolen. The Disaster Girl photo sold as an NFT, and was really, sold by the girl in that picture. That might be the biggest good thing to happen in all of the NFT space.

Mostly, artists found themselves forced to put their art up as NFTs just so someone else wouldn’t steal their art and sell it first. If ever someone was disappointed that an artist they liked “sold out to the hype” that decision may have been forced. Most artists lost money doing this, with many pieces just never selling, but the NFT inclusion fees still got paid.

So, that digital comic artist that used to do paper pages for Marvel or DC, and could sell those as originals, is not legally allowed to create an “original” NFT anyway, as that requires drumroll copying the digital art. As a work-for-hire artist for a publisher, they don’t hold the right to copy for the NFT creation.

Conclusion

I’ve always believed that 7% of all people are terrible. In a small place, it’s easy to avoid the terrible people. In a town of a few thousand, everybody knows the terrible people by sight, and will warn others openly.

“In New York, everyone’s a jerk.” No, just when 7 out of 100 people are jerks, and you’ve come as a tourist and just passed 4000 people while traversing Times Square, you just walked past a LOT of jerks. On the internet, half the world is right there.

Basically, because the “NFT” idea didn’t have proper safeguards to keep actual copyright holders safe, the whole scheme was doomed from the start. This was on the Internet, afterall. What did they think would happen?