NFTs Were Supposed to Protect Artists. They Don't. - The Atlantic

8. Intellectual property will become less defensible in the short term but it is still cultural gold. From “my kid could do that” to “right click and save,” new media from the early 20th century onward has been poorly received. As W. David Marx writes of NFTs in Dirt, “whether or not this particular NFT bubble bursts, we should take them seriously ... See more

Digital art suffers from perfect reproducibility, and hence, a lack of scarcity. There is no “real” version — even in the artist’s studio, copies proliferate in backups, on shared drives, and in cache files. For decades, we have experimented with watermarks and anti-piracy tech to try and enforce a physical, world-of-atoms scarcity on digital goods... See more

Blockchain technologies have somehow managed to land in the worst of both worlds—decentralized but not really, immutable but not really.If someone steals your ape JPEG, if you’re lucky, OpenSea might delist it and make it much harder for them to turn a profit on it. But you still won’t get your JPEG back, or have the opportunity to cash out on it y... See more