 Welcome to the July 2021 MIT Computational Law Idea Flow. For today's speaker, we are very pleased and honored to have Diana Stern with us, and Diana is going to describe and demo and then discuss with us a novel approach that she came up with for integrating the legal and the technical and licensing terms for NFTs, non-fungible tokens, in a very elegant way and a way I might add, as you'll see in a moment, that wouldn't require changing the underlying technology. So this is what we would call an elegant legal hack. Then after that, Brian Wilson and I will help to kick off the discussion with extending this idea that Diana is going to show us into some other aspects of computational law the way that we reckon it at law.mit.edu. So Diana has got a storied past in legal hacking and in computational law and in the law itself. I first met her when she was in the role of legal engineer, and that was one of the first people ever to have such a title at a large law firm. She's gone on to do great things. She's currently in-house counsel at Stripe, one of the premier digital payment companies. We've had an opportunity to collaborate. She's collaborated with many people in the MIT computational law community through our shared participation in the legal hackers group. I should mention, we're very pleased that Boston Legal Hackers chapter has kindly agreed to be a collaborator in the episode today, and so they have invited some members of their community, or I guess I should say our community, because many of us at MIT are also members of that organization and we hope to see that grow. It looks like Chris is here. With that, it's now my pleasure to turn the microphone over to Diana and welcome Diana, and we can't wait to check out your cool demo. Thanks so much, Daza, for the kind intro. I'm really glad to be here with everybody. As Daza mentioned, I'm currently a product counsel at Stripe, but I'm here in my capacity as the founder of a consulting company called Distributive, and of course, as a legal hacker, as many of you guys are as well. I'll start off just giving a bit of background on NFTs and why this legal hack matters. You guys have probably heard of NFTs by now. I'll explain a little bit what they are, but it's really amazing to see how much they've ignited retail interest in digital art and collectibles, and to give you an idea of the scale. I saw a report that said, NFT sales in the first half of this year surpassed $2.5 billion, and by comparison, all online art and collectible sales in 2019 generated $4.82 billion. We're talking about a significant increase here due to NFT marketplaces. There's now unicorn NFT companies, there's new NFT marketplaces popping up every week, there's specialized sports ones, entertainment ones, music ones, social NFT platforms, and now there's even companies popping up to support that ecosystem and allow you to customize your NFTs in different ways. Okay, so what is an NFT? I think the way people use this term, they're kind of referring to the whole package of the most common kind of NFT we see today, which is something associated with a GIF or an image or a really cool piece of art. And so it's kind of, you have three different parts, at least in the way I think of it. So one is the token. And the most common token that's used is usually on the Ethereum blockchain. And it's a token that complies with certain Ethereum standards. And so you might hear the term ERC721, that's a very common token standard. It specifies here's what has to be in the token for it to qualify as ERC721. And what's great is because that's a standard, a lot of the marketplaces support it. So that's why when you buy an NFT on one marketplace, you can usually list it or sell it on another because there's standardization. NFTs are different than cryptocurrency because each one is unique and they can't be divided up into smaller pieces, which actually is what makes royalty distributions on NFTs difficult, but that's the story for a different talk. And for those of you that are maybe a little fresher to this space, I just wanted to give an explanation of what is a token because it's kind of a theoretical concept. And I really like Anthony Lewis's definition from his blog, Bits on Blocks, which is great if you haven't read it. So tokens are conceptually entries on a ledger, a blockchain. And you own these tokens because you have a key that lets you create a new entry on the ledger and you can reassign ownership to the next person. So you don't store the tokens on your computer, you store the keys that let you reassign them to other people. So in other words, tokens are specific amounts of digital resources that you can control and you can transfer to somebody else. Okay, so that's the token. The next piece is the metadata that's gonna be referenced by the NFT and that's gonna give us information about who created it, when it was created, other pieces of information. And one of the things in there which is the third kind of juicy piece is the link to the digital image that the NFT displays. So we have the token which is usually on the Ethereum blockchain. We have the metadata referenced by the token. And then within that metadata, there's a link to the digital image you see when you go to one of these NFT marketplaces and there's like a fun gift or something. And we're gonna see this in a little more detail which is gonna make it kind of come to life but wanted to give you guys that background. So some people think of NFTs as like a certificate of authenticity. I was trying to think of an analogy the other day and I'm going to test it out on this group in the spirit of idea flow. So I was thinking, you can think of the token as like a signed limited edition frame. And the digital content is permanently glued in that frame. That's almost the follow. Oh, oh, I think under, okay, there we go. And so the picture is partly glued in the frame. So you could take a picture of the picture but there's only one copy in this special frame. And so in each person, each time a new person gets that frame they sign the back. So the frame is kind of like the NFT. There's only, if there's only one version of this NFT only one person can have it. Like you could go to open C and you can, you know right click and copy paste the picture but only one person has the NFT in the special frame. Okay. Final kind of pieces of this background here is that the NFTs I'm talking about where it's tied to digital content is actually only one kind of NFT. It's just the most popular use case we're seeing right now. So NFTs are also used in DeFi applications to represent unsettled swaps. There's no funny gifts there. And they're also used in the Ethereum naming service which is like the Ethereum version of DNS. So just to flag that there's different use cases for NFTs but today we're gonna be talking about the most popular one which is where it's tied to digital content. Okay. So NFTs are blowing up. Artists are developing new communities and income streams. There's a piece missing here which is creators regaining or maintaining control over how their work is licensed, their IP rights. So what's happening today? Today IP rights for the digital content referred to by an NFT are typically governed by the NFT marketplace's standard terms of service. So this doesn't really leave creators with a lot of control over how their work is licensed. And even if you go and create an NFT on one marketplace, you go, you check out the terms of service. You're like, all right, I'm good with this. The person that buys your NFT can then relisted on another marketplace. So this is kind of the person, the beauty of this standardization is someone could put it somewhere else. And the rights that they bought it with may not even comply with now. The rights they're gonna try to be selling to somebody else and you have no idea where they're gonna sell it. The marketplaces can change their terms at any time. The good news is with my casual poking around and spot checking, the owner or creator usually retains the copyright, which is good. And the purchaser usually in these NFT marketplace standard terms of service usually only get a limited right to display the digital content and usually explicitly do not have a right to commercialize it. So for example, the person buying your NFT wouldn't be able to display it in an online gallery and charge commission which is actually something you might wanna let them do but today that's what I'm seeing as kind of standard practice. Okay, so I would love for everyone here to be able to walk away knowing how to mint a token where you can set your own IP rights. And so in a minute, I'm gonna demo this legal hack which is you don't need to code to do it. You don't need changes to how NFT marketplaces work. You don't need changes to existing token standards. You should talk to a lawyer about the IP terms that are appropriate for your work because this is not legal advice. And in particular, today we're gonna be demoing work that's licensed under the Creative Commons attribution 4.0 international license. So we're going for a very let a thousand looms approach that allows others to remakes transform share which may not be the right license for you. So I am going to just show you guys, yes. Okay, here we go. If you go to create an NFT on rareable you'll see this magical description field and this is where you can reference the terms that you want for your IP to be licensed under. And because the description field links to the metadata of the NFT, it will stay with the NFT as long as the NFT is around. So we've put in our description field by using this NFT, you grew to these terms. We made 100 copies of it. And yeah, we'll talk a little bit about the language after the demo. Pro tip, if you're not listing it on a marketplace you should untoggle that box. And so then you just create the token. It's very easy. I've used rareable a couple times. I find it's a good platform but there's plenty of others as well. So it's going to connect to your MetaMask wallet and it's gonna ask you, hey, allow your MetaMask, if you're using MetaMask allow your MetaMask wallet to connect to this website. And I've noticed that sometimes the interfaces between different blockchain based applications and MetaMask kind of it can be a little tricky to figure out what it's asking you to do. So sometimes if you click around a bit you'll get the right message that will kind of guide you in the right direction. So what's happening now is it's asking us for permission to use rareable. And then I think in a minute it's gonna ask us, hey, you wanna mint this? Yeah, so we're gonna confirm that we wanna use rareable for minting. And so what's happening now is all that information we put on the rareable interface is gonna be recorded into our NFT. And you can see it's the transaction super fresh right now. So it hasn't even shown up on ether scan which is a blockchain explorer that basically reads what's happening on the Ethereum blockchain. But a few minutes later, we have our NFT and you can see all the metadata right there. So I'm going to, oh, and also protip .png files with multiple pages kind of get a little psychedelic like that. So figuring out how to get documents minted is an exercise in itself. But I wanna go a little bit deeper into what we did there and show you guys kind of how this all connects. So you saw that we minted on rareable. And let's see, I'm gonna share my screen here. So you saw that we had minted on rareable and now we are on open C and I've connected my MetaMask wallet. And so it's showing me, hey, yeah, you have this NFT legal and licensing integration NFT here. And if we go down to the description field we have the language that we included at minting. And so again, this is the benefit of standardization. If you go to the ERC 721 standard this description field is part of the standard. So most NFT marketplaces are going to display that field which is gonna have where your licensing terms are. So I wanna like kind of address that this language is a little general by using this NFT and people have different views on how specific you need to be about the language you use to refer to how like the underlying digital content. I kind of like this definition because it's sort of general and someone, you don't really know how people are gonna use the NFT in the future. So I think like someone could argue that if by like copying and pasting this image that's not really using the NFT and that's probably activity we wanna be covered here. But I think at the same time the general understanding of NFT especially the way it's to display on these NFT marketplaces is that the NFT includes both the token itself and the content. So maybe some ambiguity to discuss there around best practices. And if you want like a very specific and detailed definition of the different aspects of an NFT, I highly recommend checking out the wearable NFT license that Gabe Shapiro and Stuart Smollin put together. They put it on GitHub as well. And that's a great way to kind of see a really detailed breakdown of the different aspects of an NFT and a license. Okay, so let's show you guys the license. So the underlying image is licensed under Creative Commons attribution 4.0 and this is the standard Creative Commons language here. And where Dawson and I spent some time thinking is how to define the underlying image because we wanna make sure that it references the NFT in a sufficiently clear way. So we have listed out the token ID, the minting transaction hash and where the image itself is stored in IPFS. So I'll show you guys. Actually, I'm gonna do it step by step so you can see how you can see this yourself. So I'm now back on the OpenSea website and it's showing me, okay, this thing is actually was minted, you're at senior wallet and here it's gonna send me to EtherScan. So in EtherScan, again, this is just, this is a UI for reading what's happening on the blockchain itself. So we have this, let's see, this token ID, 652925, which is the same one we've referenced here and the minting transaction hash, 0xd2b8 is the one we have here. And now if you wanna see that kind of metadata part I was talking about. So we have again, the ID of the NFT and this is where the metadata stored. So if we go to, this should show us the, yep. So this will show us again, the JSON file that has the description by using this NFT read these terms and also the image, which is stored on IPFS right now. And that is the same as what we've included here in the license. So that is how it all comes together. Oh, interesting, I see we have some questions already. I think Daza, we can turn it over to kind of the next phase of discussion and perhaps more on the interlateral aspects of this. Absolutely. So first of all, bravo on that, that was a real triumph. And I was so delighted when we discussed in another context, this really I'd say like clever and effective and elegant way that you've come up with to integrate legal terms and NFT terms. And this has been such a great area that set a lot back. And it's kind of needless confusion and you're doing needful things here. And I can't wait to participate in the dialogue with this community on the hack. A couple of sort of, I don't know, I guess I'd call it like housekeeping things. One of them is that the NFT, the underlying image rather is the PNG of this file. What this file is, not coincidentally at all, but by very deliberate design is a official export from pubpub. So it has all the right metadata for our MIT computational law reports for this episode of idea flow, which is part of the media channel for the publication. And if you scroll down, what you'll see is our standard license is in fact, Creative Commons. And so at number one, we wanna carry the license forward to the NFT. In this case, we just made that decision. Number two, we think there's really interesting affordances to also having a place for open culture and open and free sort of copy left, so-called copy left terms like Creative Commons license on NFTs because that will, and that's a dimension that seldom talked about, especially when we look at people and the price runups and everything like that. So there's a couple of, so there are a couple of just, I guess extensions to the idea that between Brian Wilson, our editor in chief and I that we wanna talk about. Hey, Brian. So I'll get us started. So one of them is that part of the reason I'm so enthusiastic about this approach, Diana, is because I think it represents a type of capability that in the computational law research group at MIT we have felt is essential to successful transition of the law to the digital age. And namely that is this, I mean, just to put it in the most rudimentary terms, it's the cross-linking of two different objects on a network that together come together to perfect the legal and the technical dimensions of the business transaction, whatever that may be. And so, but when you look at applying that rudiment to more complex systems, where we think it needs to go is something that can be more scalable. And so, especially when you look at the potential of many parties joining into a contract-based set of transactions that may span systems. NFT, again, being a perfect example, you already mentioned the use case where you start in one platform and people take it to other platforms and maybe eventually ends up in platforms that don't even exist yet. So how do you solve for that? Well, using old school backwards time law, you can't, you almost can't, there's unknown unknowns. But a way to begin to narrow the gap of uncertainty is to make sure that there's interoperability at certain levels. And one of them might be expressing, for example, license terms at expected endpoints or in expected ways, and then having systems that know how to kind of fetch in a way like those terms and to include them within a package. And so, Diana and I kind of, or Diana specifically manually, you know, put the GitHub repo where we have the license into the metadata for the NFT. All of this can be done automatically in the future. And then where I could imagine this going, and I'll just put it out there to catalyze conversation about how this innovation, you know, could evolve just one possible path, could be this idea of not just inclusion by reference, but some people call it transclusion. So to transclude, as he was seem nodding, so, but for benefit of everybody else that may not have heard this sort of unusual sounding word, it's not a new word. And the idea is to be able to take content elements from different places on a network or networks of networks and to fetch them and then to assemble them basically as part of a dynamically generated new whole. This is a really good capability for these types of systems of systems. And so when you look at designing and structuring a contract-based framework for such things that could support new types of markets, for example, the evolution could be from bilateral agreement between like the artist and the buyer to multilateral agreement, sort of like the type that are allowed right now when you've got many groups of people in a community, arguably some of the platforms could be considered multilateral depending on how you look at it. And they're probably more hub and spoke, but federations and alliances and standard common approaches are frequently wrapped by multilateral agreements. But when we add this transclusion part, I would call this now the legal dimension of this an interlateral agreement. It's literally interspersing, integrating. It's an internet kind of mentality for the law. So I just wanna sort of tease you with that for a moment. And then I think Brian has one more provocation of a new idea. And if you could be briefer than me, I think we'd all be grateful, but no less contentful. And then let's crack this open for everyone to participate. What's on your mind, Brian? Yeah, so in this kind of epilogue, I'll sing one of my greatest hits, which is that law needs to fundamentally be more like crypto kitties. I know everybody here is hopefully familiar with the really fun internet game where you can breed imaginary cats or you can mint them. You can sell them or you can auction them, you can race them, you can do a number of things. But in the crypto kitties white paper, they kind of lay out four criteria for how they're creating a more generative ecosystem than I think we have in the law and that I think we can all learn a lot from. And so this is gonna be kind of like a, hopefully like a fun little provocation as Des said, but the four things are education through gamification. So that lowers barriers to entry, that lowers risk. And that's something that's definitely needed with the access to justice crisis that we're facing. You know, there's positive perception and broad appeal. So they create a bunch of training materials. The training materials are inclusive of, you know, users of all levels of ability. That's another thing that I think can help with, you know, edification about what your legal rights are, edification about, you know, how you can, you know, work with the courts. So, you know, also improves interoperability there. It proves the mechanics and starts doing some practical testing. So, you know, when crypto kiddies came out, there was a lot of uncertainty about, you know, what these NFT things could do back in, you know, 2017, 2018. But since then, you know, the same developers who made crypto kiddies made NBA top shot, which has gone on to be pretty big success. And they've been able to raise subsequent rounds of the funding. But, you know, by doing the things that they've done and the way that they've done them, which is open and standardized and transparent, they're able to do something that I think we in law need to pay a lot of attention to, which is create measurable standards that we can judge ourselves against and work with law as data. And finally, they did crypto kiddies in such a way that created a sustainable revenue model. So, you know, the game itself is incentivized for collaboration because of its openness. So you can build apps that connect with crypto kiddies where, you know, other developers can make imaginary crypto kitty hats and you can buy them for your crypto kitty and they get to participate in that value creation. You get to participate in that value creation. And I think that goes to show, you know, something else about the law, which is, you know, we hide a lot of information and we make it very difficult to access. But, you know, if we did this in a more progressive way, we could actually create new forms of value that we don't even have in law and we could offer new types of legal products and legal services that are sort of built on top of all of the cumulative knowledge that we all have together. And not coincidentally, I used some words there that align with the computational development goals. So I think, you know, there's a lot of symmetries there and I'm really excited by, you know, everything that we're getting to see and do. And I also went and changed into my Creative Commons license t-shirt, one of these moments when I went off camera so that I could show you all. But yeah, that's it from me. Bravo. Okay, so with all that in mind, let's crack the floor open to participation by our broader computational law community. And so to get us started, there's one question that is already in the queue from Chris Mondelain. And Chris asked, you know, a paraphrase, but basically could this sort of technology and approach be applied not to digital assets, you know, like this PNG file from the PDF, but to physical assets? Any thoughts on that? Yeah, so it's interesting because there were, there was some exploration around this with real estate a couple of years ago, I believe, and other kinds of assets. The challenge you get is that as soon as you go into meat space, you've now broken the connection, right? So it's not, you aren't gonna be able to be sort of interlateral to borrow Dallas language to the same degree. So you have to, I think now you have to think about more how other types of law apply and how are you going to create the connection between this digital NFT that you have and the physical real world object? I think like Everledger comes to mind as a platform has been tracking physical objects, diamonds through blockchain technology. So I think that there's room for development there, but the challenge is really gonna be you're going outside of, you know, what can be controlled digitally and now you're kind of in the factors of the real world that can break the connection between what you're trying to do and what you've encoded on a digital level. Thank you. Yeah, and that's, I would expect no less from like a frontline practicing lawyer. And I think that's very legit statement of how things are. I just wanna mess things up a little bit by looking over the horizon into the future and to say, you know, we could extrapolate too, perhaps, right? From things like bills of lading, warehouse receipts, what's now known as transferable records in the Uniform Electronic Transactions Act and e-signatures in global and national commerce act among other things where we've got these legal instruments whose sole purpose is to show ownership. Well, heck, I mean, car titles aren't even, there's a whole set of titles. And then you mentioned deeds, which has got a lot of complications, but these are examples of records where there are platforms and systems and registries that are now very much expressing themselves as digital services on networks. There may be opportunities to refactor some of that so that it can have some affordances like having a standard URI or IPFS address and having the click through licensing terms or other licensing terms, you know, be a source for inclusion by reference or transclusion if we get to the interlateral vision to cover the legal dimension. So who knows what the future will bring? Maybe people in this very room might be interested in inventing and deploying some of that through your startups and research and other activities. Speaking of which... I was just gonna add a quick thing there. Okay, and then we have to end up just so that you're not languishing branded. Know your hands up and Brian, yeah, what are you thinking? The, I believe the city of Zug in Switzerland put their land registry on Ethereum and I wanna say they did an ERC-20 token for that. There you go, yeah. So the future's breaking out all over. Thank you. Brendan Maher, you have your hand raised. What's on your mind? Hello, Dazza, can you hear me? Yep, good audio. Okay, okay. Hello, Dazza. Hello, Diana and everybody. It's great to be here. So as many of you know, I'm a long time part of their community here. I've got a lot of thoughts on this. I've just a little background. I have been involved into working in groups for Wyoming for the Digital Identity Act, the DAO statutes and potentially they're looking at NFTs. Put a lot of thought into this. And also just as a small tidbit at the Media Lab in 1995, I was part of the things that think consortium where we were involved in thinking about these ideas of how you can take digital things and reference computationally things in the real world. So I've got a long history of this stuff. That being said, there's a lot of nuance in this. And the idea of an NFT fundamentally is not ownership. And that ownership could be anything, right? It could be digital and it can and it will be physical. There are lots of people that are creating NFTs around physical things. And the challenge is as I've been stated, which is especially with the ideas of interoperability and also when you deal with more complex forms of legal issues that would arise from the representation of physical ownership, there is lots of challenges there. And we have systems currently, which deal with this, right? So we have systems and organizations, the financial industry is one where they figure out Thompson, Rutgers and all these other firms are really good at being able to tell you what the price of oil is. There's no one price of oil. There's multiple prices of oil all over the world. So we have organizations that exist already that are basically oracles that provide consensus around what things are. And we will have that for these ideas around NFTs which are touching and showing ownership over things in the physical world. But the idea of getting back to the representation legally from a computational and protocol specification for NFTs is also more nuanced because what we have here is not just the idea of, let's face it, the way this has been done up to this point is completely broken, right? Because it was just thrown out there and there wasn't a lot of thought put into it, you know, year 721. But the NFTs as we have it are more complex because we have multiple ownerships of NFT. Now you might imagine if you have an NFT and it's for the hotel industry and you have an icon of your day spa pass, right? So the NFT has ownership of the icon representing the NFT itself. There's the representational part of the NFT to show ownership of something else, right? You might have the pass, the certificate for the spa, but the actual ownership or right to use or lease or whatever is something else, right? So then there's that other component of the NFT. And then that in itself may be digital or may be physical. So these standards will need to take into account the fact that an NFT very well may be ownership of at least three things in one. And, you know, we're gonna need to deal with all these things. I've taken a lot of time here, but I think these things are really important to spell out. That's all I have to say at the moment. I hope that's helpful. Yeah, that's very helpful, especially the crosswalking it, I think to the, to, you know, other industries that have all, that have already got capabilities that could fill some of the gaps in terms of where's this, the information coming from in a way that could scale. But any thoughts on any of those insights, Diana? Yeah, when you gave the example of the sort of, I think it was like a spa login or something with NFTs, I think that that's actually a really exciting use case. And I'm starting, you're starting to see it already. There was recently a sale that kind of broke, really clogged up the Ethereum network, which was a show called Stoner Cats that released NFTs as a way to both finance the show, but also the only way you'll be able to watch it is through your having your NFT. So I'm assuming if there's going to be some website, it'll read whether you have this NFT or not. And then if you do, it'll allow you access to the show. There's, I think it's also really cool when you think about artists engaging with their fans, like you could, if someone had an NFT that was like dropped at a certain timeframe, like let's say they got sort of an NFT type ticket to your concert in like year X, you could do an airdrop of other NFTs or other tokens specifically to that group, which is kind of cool. Like an example of this is the Board Ape Yacht Club did an NFT drop where they gave everybody who had a Board Ape Yacht Club NFT a Board Ape Kennel Club NFT. And so if you had a Board Ape Yacht Club NFT at that timeframe, you got that. So I think it's gonna be really interesting to think about how does ownership work when like what are the rights to the airdrop going forward? Right now, people are like splitting up whatever they get airdropped, they're all kind of selling it separately. But do you, how's that, do we want things to like be sold together? Like if you have an NFT that's giving you, like you've gotten other NFTs and other access rights because of that, does that need to be sold as a package? Do we like that it's kind of getting separated apart? It's really interesting questions. It seems a little bit like, instead of doing like Patreon or something like that, it's like kind of like a recurring thing, like a one-time, you know, you purchase the access to it and you have some, you know, credential that shows that, you know, you have the authority to, you know, all the subsequent rights. And so I think, you know, the thinking is kind of building on top of itself, which seems very exciting that, you know, all this institutional kind of knowledge is coalescing in these interesting ways. You're here. Thank you. So gosh, a few things coming up here. So one of them I'll just pull out partly because we've got pretty good collaborative relationship with Ernst and Young in the Connection Science and the broader Media Lab research group that Law.mit.edu is part of. So I've been starting to think about tax more lately and accounting and auditing, but one question from Blake is tax law in relation to NFTs, question mark. So number one, you so far win the most concise question and I think that's really valuable. I'll do my best to be concise and then maybe throw it over, but I'll just get it started. One thing that occurs to me that isn't me trying to apply my non-existent knowledge of tax law to the underlying transaction or the international implications or anything like that, but rather in order to assess taxes, especially at the company level, we have standard accounting terms, like generally accepted accounting practices or IFRS. And these ways of accounting for, basically for revenue, for cost, you can express risk, assets, fundamentals. Some of this involves being able to describe the asset to allocate and almost like what you could consider tax, especially for public companies that are reporting to like an SEC or another nation's exchange regulator. Right now, there's a big wheezing gap I think in accountancy and therefore audit for just how to define and enumerate and track digital assets. And when I say digital assets, I think some of them are cryptographic, some of them are databases, some of it is like everything, like as companies and our lives and every transaction and the economy and in societies is becoming digital, assets are digital. And so I think the state of Wyoming is to making strides that direction thanks to Carle Reyes and other people helping out there with their statutory reforms, but we're not there yet. And then if you track it to, how do we account for the assets that we have for purposes of taxes? I would love to see one kind of renovation if you're all reform of tax law, just be at the accounting standards level to begin to just be able to express what kind of property it is that people have ownership over and how to express the transfer of ownership rights and valuation and things like that. Right now it's like a lot of guesswork, but with that little kind of orthogonal insight, Diana or anybody, especially anyone that knows about tax, including you Blake, does anyone have any thoughts on tax? Something that could be fun would be to create a kind of like a tax token and just sort of run through a bunch of synthetic experiments using agent-based modeling to see what tax circumstances would be best for you in these different places. And who knows that could, by contributing to the knowledge of the tax base, you could maybe get tax credits in the future for all your NFTs and all your crypto and stuff. Yeah, not a tax lawyer. So definitely welcome on our swing here, but I think they might be taxed as collectibles, at least the kind of NFTs we're talking about, but I agree generally with Dawza's point around kind of creating more clarity here because even the word digital asset, and this is why legislation on this is so difficult, can mean so many things and can be used in so many different ways and sort of how are you gonna specify what the basis for choosing the tax treatment is? Especially because something can be used one way, one day and then two months later with the speed that the space moves, it could be used a different way. So it might look like property one day, collectible the next day, might go back to looking like property. Yeah, and in theory, it could be currency another day, like in some imagined community, right? Yeah. And what if it's a voucher? I mean, is a NFT that's a voucher, right? Because you have a representation of that with art, is that, you know, what is that? That's probably none of those. Right, instantly when I said currency, I am aware that it's no longer non-fungible. It becomes fungible, but that's just to show, you could have a fundamental state change from like, you know, like liquid to solid, like it's not even NFT anymore and then maybe it morphs back. Yeah, that's such a great point about vouchers. So I wanna go back to something that you said, Diana, which was in relation to a comment from Brendan, you were saying, you know, NFTs as like login or identity could be an interesting application area. Like, could you expand on that a little bit? Like kind of what were you kind of imagining there? Like how could that work? Yeah, so I'm thinking more about like the fan engagement or access to special content. So the Stoner cat's example is kind of the classic one we're seeing today where if you go to a website that the content is gonna be locked until you let that website read your metamask wallet and your metamask wallet says, yep, this person has this NFT, let them watch it. So you can imagine that like, maybe instead of a bunch of passwords, you have NFTs and you're actually, that can be a much more seamless experience. I mean, people have one pass, I guess you're already kind of getting this, but that could be a much more seamless experience. And also like, how does that affect how whatever platform display and content, how does that affect their business model? Like can they, you know, that compared to subscriptions is also kind of interesting. So like you have an initial event where you kind of mint these NFT login codes. And then if you're able to get some kind of royalty on the secondary market and your NFT does really well and everybody's kind of motivated for it to do really well. Also, you know, we have to be careful of securities laws and other things, but just thinking freely as, as a legal innovation designer will say, that could be very interesting, like financing model. Yeah, I know there's- I got a comment coming, okay, Brian. Oh, I was just gonna say, I know there's a group called Chilliz that does, they like tokenize sports fan ownership of sports teams and you can vote on, you know, different decision, like different classes of decisions that your favorite sports team makes, like, you know, who is the player of the game or what should our new uniform color be? So I think that there is a little bit of that starting and, you know, if you like look at, you know, getting highlights that way or, you know, thinking about concerts and, you know, being able to see, you know, the live version, the live stream of the concert after the fact or something like that. I think there's, you know, there's a lot of interesting things happening that seem really fun. I think, and this is kind of one of the things that I've learned a bit from Daza, but it's kind of like a, your imagination is your own limitation really here. So, you know, shoot for the stars. Oh, sorry, here, here. It's so actually, Brendan, may I re defer for a moment for another, I'll make one more comment and then right back to you. I know you were trying to get in and we'd love to hear more voices as well, but one way to shoot for the stars is to have a really solid launch pad that's, you know, well-grounded on earth. And so looking backwards, the foundations of law way back, like medieval times, for example, that we can find some primitives that may be useful to dust off and get more explicit about. They've almost become so implied that they're invisible now. One in this realm of identity is when people needed to, you know, have to present good evidence of who they are and especially the facets of identity that relate to their authorization, like what, like sort of the use case that I think you were just getting at, Brian, like I'm, I have this roles of fan and maybe I have backstage access or whatever the equivalent is or, you know, unlock cool content. We used to basically have these physical, like rings that you would, the signets that, and waxed seals and there's all sorts of ways to put things under seal to show authorization and so forth. And they were very individual and they also showed role and authorization at a certain point. And so, you know, I'm almost hearing something like that, like a sort of, you know, the way that we will mint, you know, tokens for OAuth2 and OpenID Connect or in the older days, security assertion markup language tokens for single sign on or in the emerging times, things like verifiable credentials from the World Wide Web Consortium Standard. Maybe there's a, maybe there's a kind of identity and authorization shaped NFT that would have very different dynamics. It would certainly be non-fungible. It's very operational and functional, but it's not like, you know, art or something. It's literally like a capability to operate in a network. Very, very interesting stuff. Okay, enough for me. Others, go for it. Comment that might be useful at the structure. I think the way to think about the entire space is more broadly that NFUs are a ownership of a right, of a right to whatever. And I think this is illustrated by the fact that if you have an NFT of a conference pass that you purchased, that is a right, maybe to enter a certain conference hall, right? So things get very interesting when we start to think about NFTs in these terms of really ownership of rights. So I wanted to put that out there. You're here. Let's see. So we have some more observations. When I was mentioning something that Diana said, by the way, for those of you watching this video later, she said it in the chat, which you can't see, but if you sign up for Ideaflow and sort of show us a little bit about your interest in computational law and that you'd be a contributor as opposed to a passive viewer of television-like content on YouTube, you too could be invited to participate in future sessions and then you can hear the secret chatter that happens behind the scenes. But speaking of secret chatter, there was a, well, I guess I would just say a red team use case or like a challenge use case. And the question is, how does, again from Chris Montalane, thanks, Chris, longtime legal hacker and code for Boston guy and startup culture aficionado who's now transcended internationally, but we miss you in Boston, Chris. So he asks, how does asset recovery occur when keys are stolen and ownership is transferred? Any thoughts on that? That's a really interesting question. So the old saying goes, not your keys, not your crypto. That also means if you hold your keys and someone else gets them, as a practical matter, it's gonna be very difficult for you to get them back. I mean, there are, if you can find that person, I know that there's some attorneys that kind of pursue this kind of work of helping people get their keys back. I've never engaged in that. But you could think about, how could you think about that possibility in terms of the license that you get? Do you wanna have in your license something about a sort of marauder that gets the keys and goes off and maybe they don't get the IP rights. And then maybe that gives the, if the collector inherits those rights from the creator, maybe that gives them more room to go after and sue that person that kind of got the keys and is maybe doing stuff with the image or the collectible that you wouldn't want to happen. So, but I would love to hear from other folks on what they think you. Any other thoughts? Okay, can keep thinking about whether you have thoughts. And in the meantime, we have a hand raised from Andre. So Andre, feel free to come off mute and share with us your contribution. Hello, hello everyone. And I continue on the discussion of identity. It seems to me that we, all the ideas is related to fungibility. And we can see these by a simple example. A driver's license is a physical document that is unfungible because you have your name, your data on it. When you try to translate this to digital realm, we can think of an FD with your identity and with data that related to some authorization as in this case, the authorization to drive. And the idea of fungibility and unfungible assets on the real world translated to the digital realm is very rich. And we can find a lot of use case for this and try to translate and to create new facilities, even new facilities, even new new uses for past and old ideas as Daza has mentioned. Here, here, yeah. I mean, it's, you got to be a speaker in the future. I think what you said is fundamental. So, are there any thoughts or comments? I've got it. I have a comment on that. Okay, and then, Brendan, we need to save when you're done a couple of minutes for the delivery of everyone's special prize. I'll be brief. It's important to understand at this juncture that the ideas around identity and keys are rapidly, rapidly involving and our understanding of keys and key management in a year or two are gonna be fundamentally different. And it's just really worthy to note because keys will be distributed in very new and novel ways. So we'll work through these problems. That's all I have to say, but identity is important. It's the holy grail for all of us. Here, here, yeah. Yeah, it's really, that's a fundamental vein, Andre. Thank you. So now looking forward, I'm sorry. I mean, there's a lot more to discuss and ours never enough, but, you know, we only have a couple of minutes left and so I am thrilled to say Diana's innovation never stops. And part of the brainstorm for this session that she had was, you know, we could actually mint something for this idea flow episode and we could make it available to people that actually participated in the episode. And so we did it. So I've just put in the chat, so please go and find that, the URL to this very form. And would you be willing to walk us through the form, Diana, and tell people what will happen when they fill it out? Yeah, sure. So just enter in your email so we can verify even one of the live attendees and then give us an Ethereum address. So your public wallet address, do not send us your private key. You may also, you know, best practice is sometimes to create a fresh wallet address so that we're not seeing all of your other things you might own in your current wallet. And then we really welcome your feedback. So if you have anything to share, let us know. And yeah, who knows? Maybe we'll end up using this NFT as some kind of access to future computational law, NFT discussions or something. And on the identity point, it would be very interesting to get into the PII issues at some later point. Because as soon as you start talking about drivers license and other things, I'm like, oh boy, the data law issues there are real. Yeah, it's red hot. Yeah, are we ready for a data access and portability request under CCPA and GDPR? No? Yeah, the permanently reported data on this blockchain is not ready. But speaking of the identity aspect, which is really important, you'll notice that there is a request for an email. And so special note, please use the same email that you used on the sign up form. And if you've used more than one, because say you were in a previous computational law class at MIT and you've also signed up on the form, just put each email in there that it might have been so that we can connect your presence today with that you're an authorized recipient of this very most special cool treat. Okay, so with that, any closing words, Diana, as we wrap up? No, just really appreciate everybody engaging on this topic and the opportunity to speak here. And thank you so much, Daza and Brian, for your collaboration on this stuff. It's really exciting. It's been a lot of fun. Yeah, great. Thank you. And I'd also like to recognize and thank as well as Brian, Megan Ma, who's our new managing editor at the Computational Law Report, and Waseem, who's joined our sort of executive editing team and come over from other ventures at MIT and it's exciting life. And so, and also Andrew Domsalski, who is also on the executive editing team. So just so grateful that we're able to be with you and to have the MIT Computational Law Community, especially through this publication, kind of open the doors to everybody's ideas so that we can catalyze new thinking and sort of hack the future together. A big thank you to Diana for bringing your A game here. I think, you know, just Bravo. And we'd love to see you again. There is demand, like popular demand to do like a workshop or something like that. So we should maybe connect that to the other thread we have going about Future Vistas for Diana Stern at paw.mit.edu. So until next month, on the last Friday from 12 p.m. to 1 p.m. Eastern, we want to wish you a fond farewell and don't forget to sign up and tune in next month because we're going to be collaborating with the inestimable T. Bo Treppel who is running the Stanford Codex Computational Antitrust Initiative. And we're advisors on each other's projects. And so you'll want to be part of that and it'll be very interesting things that emerge. So with that, thanks everybody. We're going to wrap it up.