It's a GOOD question!
With all the voices on Tapas, let me shed you some light.
First, I need you to remove and forget about all the NFT knowledge you had learned from whoever and whatever person you learn it from.
Secondly, I need you to understand what is Decentralised Storage System and IPFS.
Third, I need you to re-learn how a Non-Fungible Token works and help artists in the future.
If you are unable to do that, sorry, better keep the idea to yourself at this time.
If you can do it. Let's continue...
Key point 1: NFS as Proof of Membership
Where it is a tool to ensure your supporter is able to directly reward you and access your content after they pay you. It is like a service, it helps you to manage your supporters without the need for a centralised platform.
Example Tapas, you need to go through Tapas to connect with your subscriber. With NFT, the interaction between you and your subscribers are two-way, direct. You may code your system to manage the NFT owner, like a membership system.
- Is that an advantage? Yes and no! NFT will only help famous and larger artists who already have some followers and fans that they are able to be independent on their own. But small artists like those in Tapas still need a CENTRALISED community here to support each other. So NFT generally does not benefit the smaller artists in a whole.
- Personal take: at the moment, too many hypes and scams in the realm. A lot of people are on NFT just for the money and not for the art. So we need time to wait for it to cool down. Again, it will still go to the question above. Will it benefit small artists like us? Nope.
Key point 2: NFS as Intellectual Property Rights
The more valuable feature of NFT is that you may permanently date your works on IPFS and secure it and no one shall be able to tamper the data that is already on the chain. That is some strong form of protection over your work. However, is that something you can bring to the court for any potential violation of IP rights?
- Let's look at the case of Beeple. He explicitly uses the trademark of Disney and sells his work as an NFT. Disney was unable to bring him to court for many reasons. One is the method of exchange for the NFT is not in an enforceable currency, another issue is, the location where it took place.
- Thus, it comes to a question, if we are the original author, how can NFT protect our IP other than protecting our claim of the published date? At the moment, it does nothing other than that. Due to no country having established any policy or rules regarding that. That's why we haven't heard Disney took any legal action on Beeple yet. And he is lucky, that he gets away with it. But all came back to the fact that others may still steal your work and sell it. Therefore, NFT is not a good IP protection tool.
Key Point 3: NFT as Tool of Royalty
One advantage of NFT is its ability to reward the author with the pre-programmed royalty system. Example, author issue NFT, sell it to owner A, and then owner A sell it to owner B, the part of the selling profit will be rewarded to author automatically. This system is designed to fix the problem of existing auction system that does not benefit the original author.
- The royalty system does help the author, but it will only work when the author themselves can become famous and highly desirable.
- This system can also be useful if you use NFT as membership. It means your membership can be transferable yet you still earn profit from part of the transfer activity.
- This might be something promising for artists. However, one must read the smart contract to learn whether this system was programmed properly into or not. At the moment, a lot of NFT services smart contracts are still not publicly accessed, means, they are not fully open source! You'll be surprised, the site might tell you they are open source, in fact, how many of you seriously go and check their git and try to run their git? I would like to let you know this truth, very very little! Artists, most of us are not engineers and not educated in computer science (I am professional, and also a "person in the art" <- legal term) thus, a lot of them fall in a trap of fraudulent NFT platforms.
Summary...
To issue an NFT, it is expensive! The cheapest that I know of, well still cost around USD1 for a single file. If you are not using the IPFS, there is no point to do an NFT. Unless you are focus on key point one, which is the membership management, yes, may be you will have better success. But if all you want is to get rich quick like Beeple, you better don't involve in the realm! As for the environmental concern... well, I guess those who wrote about those long long argument never really know where the major environmental impact really from. I can always post more long long long articles that counter that. but then, will they read it? nope! As in Tapas, there aren't many novel readers, most are comic readers. So I doubt people will read my reply too. LOL.
okay, so let me just do the same thing... yes, by sharing some long long article for the pro-blockchain argument on the environmental issues. So this is not trying to start a war in this forum okay, if you really into it, you may read it. if not into it... it is still okay to be ignorant. Here's one SHORT article, please take note about the source of the article is from OECD:
https://www.oecd.org/finance/Blockchain-technologies-as-a-digital-enabler-for-sustainable-infrastructure-key-findings.pdf
And another additional note about the environment. If you are still drinking with a plastic straw, if you are still ordering take-away with disposable containers, you're contributing to the harm of the environment way worst than using decentralised technology!
Who am I? I'm a professional technologist. My comments above were not paid and It should not serve as any financial advice.
But I hope one day the decentralised technology shall redeem itself and may the next generation of interconnectivity and trust be developed into something that can benefit the world. Peace!
