 Hello, welcome to our NFT event. My name is Ina and I am a second year student at Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence Department here in Tilburg University and I'm about to guide you through this event. This is an event hosted by Studium Generale and in collaboration with Animo and Enigma which are both student associations. Enigma is my student association which is for my course, Cognitive Science, Artificial Intelligence and Animo is for online cultures and culture studies. I'm going to first guide you through how the event is going to look like. We have two speakers followed by a Q&A for those two speakers and then a little break, other two speakers and followed by another Q&A and then in the end an interactive discussion. Okay, oh wait, I shouldn't have done that. Well, that's good to break the ice. Let's talk about NFDs. What comes to mind when you think of non-fungible tokens? Can you understand only the none? Because that's what first happened with me. So, fungible. Fungible, non-fungible basically means that you can track its ownership. Somebody owns it, you can own it publicly. And token is used because it covers a lot of things. NFDs can be from tweets to pictures to videos, game clips, digital perfume, dog sticks, even real estate. There's a lot of things being sold as NFDs and a lot of people have it. Even Snoop Dogg and Eminem made a video for the VMAs with their board AP Yacht Club NFDs. You might have seen it. Madonna has one. She has this one. And it makes you think, why did Madonna choose this one? Well, she didn't. She wanted this one. But this one was too expensive for Madonna. This monkey was too expensive for Madonna. Yeah. Oh, wait. We need to come back. Oh, you get to see my slides. Sorry. This one was too expensive for Madonna. So she settled for that one. She settled by paying $500,000 US dollars. That's called settling for a different type of monkey. So we don't know why this monkey is worth more than this one or why this doodle is worth 25 times more than this monkey. And that's on sale. So NFDs are not something you can comprehend very, very easily. It's something that has a lot of regularities and a lot of weird trends. But it's something that's definitely interesting. Is this a revolution in art or are we all material girls living in a material world? Let's find out. Our first speaker today is Dominic Gut. He's a researcher and a teacher at Erasmus University. He teaches economics of digital markets, research message and web scraping. I invite you all to welcome Dominic Gut. Thank you so much, Ina, for the kind introduction. Hi, everyone. My name is Dominic. I'm from Erasmus. Super excited to be here today talking to you about the past, present, and future of NFTs. And nowadays I'm always starting out by saying I think this is the largest in-person crowd I've talked to since 2019. So I'm even more excited about that. Still a bit rusty, but going to shake it off quicker, I think. So Ina, thanks for setting the stage. Actually, I was almost not supposed to be here because actually who got invited is my PhD and co-author, Janice. You see him here on the left side. But he's sick today, so I'm subbing for him. And let me start out by telling our past, present, and future about NFTs. You know, this guy is super talented. We're working on NFTs together and when we started out in the past, he was like, Dominic, we should buy NFTs. It's going to make us rich. Now, our present is still, we're working together and he's still here. Dominic, we should buy NFTs. We should have bought NFTs. And I'm sure you know, if you fast forward 20 years from now, what he's going to say is, Dominic, we should have bought NFTs. You know, looking back at or having the slides in mind that I'm going to show you, I'm not sure if that's really true. Future's going to tell. But that's just kind of past, present, and future in a nutshell, personally. But of course, in this presentation, I want to give you a bit more details, give you a bit more run through, okay, what happened, what's happening now, what's happening in the future. And we're all learning kind of together. I was doing a lot of prep for this presentation, digging up the history. And I thought, okay, there's no better place than a real museum. And so it happened that I went to Seattle a couple of weeks ago, and Seattle is actually home to the world's first NFT museum that you can actually go physically, not virtually. And there's a lot I learned there. And some of that is in the slides today. So for example, what I didn't know, maybe you maybe you know much more about NFTs than me. So that's also why I'm excited to be here. So one thing I didn't know is that the first NFT was actually our kind of NFT was called colored coins. It was minted on the on the Bitcoin chain. And it was actually just changing the metadata of Bitcoin. I'm sure you all know changing the metadata of Bitcoin such that they take colors. Now they're not particularly non fungible because you know, Bitcoin are fungible. And but that happened in 2012. Now what happened in 2014 was that the first of what most people believe is the first NFT was minted was called quantum was minted by Kevin McCaw and it just recently sold for $1.4 million. It's a gift. It doesn't look too fancy. But there was kind of the birth, the birth hour that I consider of NFTs is called quantum that happened in 2014. What happened in 2015 was kind of quantum leap. All the famous NFT connections that we know today, most of them are minted on the Ethereum chain. And there was there was established in 2015 and soon after the birth of Ethereum, something very essential for the internet, namely gaming, came on the stage for for Ethereum. The first actual game on Ethereum was called Ethereum. And it was this artsy, nerdy kind of crafty. We don't really know what we're doing, but we're doing it anyway kind of game, you know, it looks a bit like the board game settlers. And you can buy tiles for one ever. That's pretty expensive. You can buy tiles, you can build stuff on them. I'm not sure if you'd seen that, but there's like a rocket launch pad here or the 76ers logo there. You defend it against Vikings who are trying to destroy your tiles. So there was the first kind of baby steps into the into the realm of NFT gaming. And I thought that's there was kind of cool. Ethereum. Now, let's fast forward to the present. I mean, Ina, she she outlined it well already. Now, Ethereum is home to the most important collections that we see today. The Crypto punks, the board apes, the world of women, the mutant apes. And everything went through the roof. The interest sky rocketed. Partially, you you coin it well, probably spearheaded by the interest of many pop culture celebrities. And I actually did a little quiz for you. All these all these NFTs are owned by famous people. Who have you know and I picked it by resemblance to the actual celebrities. So they all kind of look alike. So who do you think owns this one? Raise your hands, please. There's no there's no test afterwards. Take a chance now. Any wild guess? Sorry? It's not Paris Sylvan, but very close. It's Heidi Klum. Okay, who's this one? This one's pretty famous. Eminem, right? Who's this one? It's not Katy Perry, but she's she's blonde. So the celebrity is blonde. Yeah. No, Reese Witherspoon. And the last one, they're the difference is quite big. Very good one is Neymar. Okay, so but, you know, I think you kind of get the idea. These are super famous. Everyone knows it. You know, these are stupid pictures, but kind of we know what we're talking about. They're super expensive. And here's a bit of here's a bit of money history about crypto punks. So I plotted, you know, you see, I did some Excel. I plotted the monthly average sales price of crypto punks between June 17 and August 2020. Almost nothing happened. It was like they were minted and they were hovering between $50 and maybe $400 a month for three years. There was three years of your and my chance to buy this and get rich. But then suddenly in August 2020, it went from, let's say $400 to $1400. And if I had been in the position to, you know, experience this hike, owning a crypto punk, I've been like, wow, I can buy a new bicycle or what? If I sell it. But then came, then came the boom years, the gold rush era, October 2020. You know, this is, this is the price. You can barely see it on the Y scale because the Y scale ends at $600,000 US dollars now. And then it's increased. So you own a crypto punk $1600 here. One year later, it's an average $500,000 US dollars. I mean, I have, I don't know. I have not seen that before personally. And this has been the boom years. Soon after came a bust. But I think this is part of the reason why we're all sitting here because we've witnessed this crazy ride. But crypto punks, mutinames, they're not the only ones there are out there. This is the MFR collection. And I want to visualize some pattern, you know, all the famous collections, what they have in common is usually they're algorithmically created with some parameters that are always changed. You know, for example, there's the parameter headdress. Some have this flight helmet, some have bandanas, some have a beanie, whatever, or headphones, different colors or smoking, not smoking eyes, you know, they are algorithmically changed. Then you have a collection of, I don't know, 10,000 NFTs and they're sold. Okay, this is the pattern that we see recurring. One thing that I want to dig into is where does it come from? Who of you knows this meme? Are you kidding? Are you winning some? This is one of my favorite memes. And I just want to show that internet culture is deeply ingrained in the NFT culture. And I think we need to know that in order if we want to take baby steps towards understanding this whole phenomenon. So Sartoshi, the creator of the MFR collection admitted, you know, I'm a big fan of this meme. I kind of, it feels like this is me, you know, so I wanted to make a collection around this thing. And you know, this feeling is also, I think, part of why people want to buy that. You know, Eminem wanted to buy the ape that has this cap that he's usually wearing and maybe other, Steph Curry also has similar intentions, you know, you get to what I'm saying. Another internet culture thing is gaming. I talked about, Ethereum is not surprising that many of the constructs that spearheaded NFTs are games. You have crypto kiddies, you raise a kitty, you breed them, you tailor make them, you sell them, you know, this is what the internet and people on the internet do. You have XT infinity where you battle with your pets like these strange crossovers between Pokemon Digimon and Hamsters. And so games really help getting everything going. And then needless to say, I mean, I'm a business economics scholar, we're very interested in the platforms that are out there. Platforms really acted as a catalyst to making this whole culture going because huge motivation probably, we get to that, of having and owning NFTs, you can make money with them. For that you need platforms, super rare, open sea, rare, those are platforms where demand meets supply and creators meet buyers. So they've been instrumental. But talking about platforms, there was this really, for me, it was kind of a paradigm shift in the NFT, in the NFT era when the NBA decided to launch its platform, NBA top shots. I'm sure many of you know it. But why has it been a paradigm shift for me? Because formerly NFTs have existed on the internet. They were difficult to touch. You know, there was nothing physical that I could experience about NFTs. But NBA, they launched NFT moments or NBA moments, but there was that you can collect and trade and whatever. And there were physical things in the world that are kind of counterparts or equivalents, which is NBA cards. In the US, it's a huge thing. You buy them, you collect them, your grandparent has done so, your dad or your mom have done so. You keep on doing it. And suddenly, there was this digital NFT counterpart. And we thought, OK, now there's this bridge between the NFT and the physical world. Let's see if they're kind of interactive. And what we did is, sorry, this is a shameless plug of our own research. What we did is we looked at what the launch of NFT did to the eBay prices of basketball cards compared to a control group of baseball cards. And we found that once this NFT platform was launched, the prices of the baseball cards took a deep dive. Because probably there was really a change in people's collection habits. Many of them went away from buying these cards and went towards buying those. If you're interested in it, I can share that paper with you. But we were really thinking, OK, this is the first time where we're seeing a material in economic relationship between the digital NFT and the physical collectibles world. Businesses, soon after, stepped in to further solidifying this physical digital bridge. For example, Tiffany came in, offering these pendants to CryptoPunk owners. They actually, they made these pendants of gold and diamonds, and they went to CryptoPunk owners saying, hey, you know, I made this art. I can make this pendant for you. You have the exclusive right buying this thing. Imagine, you have something digital and somebody offers you to spend a lot of money for something else. But it actually, like all of the CryptoPunk owners that were offered one actually bought it. Yeah, probably you know it, Nike, with the artifact collaboration, they launched the CryptoKicks. It's just some sneaker that you can own online. You cannot wear it. Maybe your Fortnite character can wear it. Maybe you can wear it on the metaverse, but that's really for the future, you know. Right now, you don't have any, any real utility of it. Or the Dolce & Gabbana glass suit. Isn't incredibly expensive. You cannot wear it. The impossible Tierra. It was, it was really a work of art designing it. It's not just, you know, copy, pasting some weird picture of a Tierra. There's work behind it. It's expensive, but you, right now, there's, there's no model that you can really gain wearing utility out of that. Just a glimpse of what, what businesses are, or what physical businesses are really gaining out of NFTs right now. The biggest player right now is Nike. They made, they make roughly 185 million already with NFTs. There's Dolce & Gabbana, Tiffany, Gucci and Adidas. And so they're advancing their business towards NFTs, but there are also businesses that change because NFTs are there in the sense that they're trying to shield themselves from NFT competition. I told you, people stop buying basketball cards, the prices go down. And eBay knows that, and part of eBay's business is this trading card business, super important for them. And eBay knows its weaknesses compared to NFTs. eBay, you know, when I'm selling you my, my Michael Jordan card and you paid $10,000 for that, you're not sure if I ship it, you're not sure if the quality is right. So there's this trust problem, you know, but then, but for NFTs, it's not there because for NFTs, I post an NFT, you make an offer, I accept boom, it switched, I get, I get your other, you get my NFT, everything's solved. And eBay knows this flaw. So they installed the eBay vault, where it's just basically a vault where the trading cards lie. And when I sell my card to you, you send me the money and then they just transfer the ownership rights to you. But the card stays in the vault unless you say, ship it to me, please. So they're kind of imitating this NFT business model. And I think that's super fascinating. Now, I think a key part that we still need to understand that was also raised earlier is, okay, why are people buying NFTs? And I'm not going to answer the question today. But there's some things that I think are apparent here. Do people want to get rich quick? Well, some of them, I think they definitely do. If you follow Twitter, these accounts, this activity is ridiculous. Do people just want to collect and nerd around? Well, I wanted to, when I was 14, 15, 16. That's not my binder, though, I wish it was. Or people, do people just want to flex? Maybe you've heard it, but there was this, this influencer who sold his Lamborghini in order to buy a Bordeaux because he said, okay, Bordeaux are just a bigger flex. Probably partially all of this is kind of true in different shapes. But when we think about the future, and this is really pure crystal balling that I'm doing right now. When we think about the future, I think we need to bear in mind sustainable, meaningful business models that can be enhanced with NFTs. For example, tickets. Who have you remembers what his or her first concert was offline? Raise your hand, please. You remember? Okay, I thought everyone raises their hands. So I, I, I know what my first concert was Metallica 2003, San Anger tour. The album was bad, but they opened with Metal Militia. And I was like, wow, shit. I thought they were opening with some, I don't know, new stuff, but they, they, they played Metal Militia and it was, it was one of the best concerts I ever saw. And I wish I had this ticket today so I could put it on my fridge and feel like, Hey, yeah, this is nice. But I don't have, if they had tickets with NFTs, I couldn't, I don't know, have it in my wallet and look at it and be proud of it. And I have real willingness to pay having that ticket, like I would pay a few bucks for it, like somehow getting a time machine and getting the ticket back. But I don't, maybe NFTs could solve it. Music rights, property rights and music are horrible. Like artists suing each other, you copy me, you copy I copy you, some coaches like that, some coaches don't, you know, why, why, why can we not use NFTs to, you know, put a fingerprint on what we did. Legal documents, legal documents, I'm German, it's horrible. John Mini is just a mess concerning legal documents. Can we not have some NFT technology ease this up? I beg you, please do it. Because right now it's all about expensive monkeys doing a belly dive and everybody giving up. I have not lost the hopes that NFTs can really enhance our lives. And I think these are some ways that they can do that. Museums, we're talking about arts. There's this call from German museums, sorry, it's a bit German biased, but those are the web pages that I can read. And German museums say we need an NFT strategy because I don't know, they don't really know how to use NFTs or to make money out of them. Let's be honest, otherwise they don't adopt it. And Damien Hurst, this famous British, I just said, okay, I hope my beer, he had his own strategy because what he did is pretty interesting. He created a lot of, like a couple of thousand, I think, physical artworks and put an NFT to each artwork. Sold it, he's famous, he could sell out well. So everybody had this NFT and this physical piece. And then after a couple of weeks, now you're going to decide customers or art lovers. Do you keep the physical piece? Do you keep the NFT? Many of them or the majority of them kept the NFT. And I think this also brings us a bit closer to okay, why do people, what do people like about NFTs? Probably it was like idiosyncratic to the experiment that this guy was doing. But I think it's a very interesting data point. Keep in mind going forward. Now, whether we like NFTs, whether we don't like NFTs, I think the mentality is really polarized right now. Some people love it, some people hate it. And I think nothing captures this mentality better than the online review distribution of the Seattle NFT Museum right now. Because there's so many people giving five stars loving it. There are also like even more people giving one stars hating it. And let me tell you that I did my PhD dissertation on online reviews. I've seen a lot of online review distributions, but I've never seen an online review distribution like that. And with that, I'd say, okay, thank you very much for your attention. It's been a pleasure presenting for you and keep the questions coming. Thank you very much. Okay, this has been very funny, entertaining, I loved it. And now we're going to welcome our second speaker, which is going to be Paul Holliday, a teacher at the Tilburg Institute of Law, Technology and Society. So please welcome Paul. Right, so thanks for having me. It's awesome actually to see everyone in person, same thing. And I'm obviously going to be talking about this from a legal perspective. And basically, I wanted to title my talk today, NFT Mania Property and Art. I am going to be focusing largely in the digital art area in order to just provide us with a working example that we can use when we start to look at some of the legal concepts in this regard. But essentially, that's kind of how I want to approach it is from a legal perspective in that regard. And so a little bit of background about myself. I'm South African, originally. So I was raised in South Africa, studied there, actually practiced for seven years as a lawyer in South Africa. Before I came and studied a law and technology masters at Tilburg University. And before that, I also actually worked at a startup tech company that was actually working on a blockchain application. That application was more in the context of financial investments in the green economy and sustainable development. But so that that was actually what kind of got me interested in this kind of law and technology sphere and what, you know, navigating that area. So what I want to do, though, is be a typical lawyer and provide a disclaimer before I go into anything else. And so this is a quote from Kevin Low and Emix. So basically, they said many lawyers do not understand the core technical terms in the blockchain narrative and incorrectly assume that they map directly onto similar legal terms. Concurrently, many technologists make false assumptions about how the legal rules work and thus imagine legal systems for disruption. So I'm going to today try to address some of these incorrect assumptions. The disclaimer is essentially that I am a lawyer. I do not claim to be a techie in this regard. But obviously because a lot of my research is more in the intellectual property side of things and stuff, we obviously do endeavor to understand the technology side as much as possible in order for us to actually try and make sense of this divide between technology and law in that context. So, yeah, my research largely deals with, for example, intellectual property, particularly copyright. Currently, I've been working on platform regulation in particular with the digital single market directive. So just that's a little bit of extra information there. But before we can really talk about NFTs, we actually just have to deal with this idea of smart contracts. And I just want to point out that smart contracts, even though they are named that way, aren't necessarily smart. Okay. You might want to know why. Well, firstly, smart contract is not a term that was given by lawyers. It was a computer scientist that originally coined the term smart contract. And in this, before I get to that, so in this regard, what happens is that a smart contract essentially what it deals with, it automates the obligations of a contract, right? But what a contract actually is at the end of the day is an agreement between two parties. Now, a lot of computer scientists are like, oh, well, smart contracts, what they do is they essentially make it impossible to breach or break a contract. And what that's an incorrect assumption, referring to the earlier slide, where it doesn't take into account certain contractual principles. For example, in contract law, you have the doctrine of mistake and misrepresentation, which apply depending on which country you live in. But what these doctrines essentially look at doing is they recognize that because a contract is essentially an agreement between two parties, there's a meeting of the minds. That's the phrase that people like to use in this context. And mistake and misrepresentation essentially acknowledge that sometimes one of those parties isn't clear about what they're actually agreeing to, which means there isn't a meeting of the minds. And so what mistake and misrepresentation do as doctrines is they essentially say, well, because there wasn't a meeting of the minds, we can void the contract because there wasn't an agreement in the first place. The problem with smart contracts is that especially also on a blockchain, it's very difficult to try and work backwards in that regard. Because once it's verified on the blockchain, that's essentially it. The only other way to deal with that is through a fork, which is also very problematic in that regard. So just wanting to point out that when we talk about smart contracts, please don't think that they are necessarily these intelligent things. They actually do not necessarily represent the legal context very well. And they do not map nicely into the legal context that we're going to be talking about. So many of you probably know about this example. So Beeple or the artist Mike Winckelman. And he sold the NFT for this artwork over here, which was called Every Day is the first 5,000 days for $69 million. I'm going to kind of use this as a focal point or an example to talk about some of the concepts that we're going to be looking at. And the first thing I want to deal with in this regard is these are some of the claimed advantages of NFTs. So OK, NFTs allow artists to engage directly with their audience by presenting digital or physical pieces of art, eliminating the need for agents. OK, so that was one of the things that Beeple himself actually said as well, that he could engage with his audience in that regard. The other one, for example, NFTs present an alternative so artists can mint an NFT for a piece of work and set their own prices on easy to use online NFT marketplaces. There's actually another one which I didn't include in the slide and that's basically that's one of the claims that NFTs supposedly accomplish is they create scarcity in the digital world because of we're going to deal with hashing a bit later. But the point there being you take a digital object which otherwise wouldn't have scarcity in and of itself and through minting of an NFT you create scarcity. So the idea behind that is that I have now this slide clicker in my hand because it's a physical object. I'm the only one who can be holding it at any given time. So that means it's rivalrous. OK, you cannot be in possession of it when I'm in possession of it. And as a result of being rivalrous, we almost see what that adds value to it because, you know, if you want this clicker, you either have to come and take it from me or you get what I'm trying to say in that regard. Whereas in the digital world with the ease of copying and stuff like that, we need to try to create that rivalry. And one of the claims of NFTs is that it does this. OK, so I need to talk about the central role of hashing because obviously NFTs operate in a blockchain and the blockchain being a decentralized ledger in that regard. And hashing essentially entails the use of an algorithm to take data of an arbitrary size and produce a deterministic fixed length output known as a hash. OK, why this is important? So essentially you can almost view it as a digital fingerprint for a more simplistic way of looking at it. Why would this be important? Well, archivists use this a lot in order to verify data. Guys, it's a way of seeing whether something has been tampered with in a digital sense. And so it becomes actually very important in that regard. And that's kind of one of the strong points of blockchain technology in that regard is that once something is verified, you can be assured that it is the right thing. Sorry, I've gone. So the point behind hashing is this last point here. An identical file will always produce the same hash. OK, so we were talking about scarcity earlier. Can anyone see a potential issue with that at all? I'm curious. Does it does anyone can anyone see a potential issue with that? Anyone when it has it? Yeah, an identical file will always produce the same hash. Yeah, OK, so that's true. But there's another thing that also comes in here. What if I change? Say I take a photograph or a digital artwork and I change a single pixel on that file. They are visually identical, but it'll create a different hash because it's not the same file. And this actually what happens is it opens it up to this theoretical possibility for an artist and that in this instance is called it the dishonorable artist can essentially sell multiple visually identical NFTs on different blockchains or on different. So so they will make different NFTs by changing something and I'll show you how they can change it. So these are ways that you could essentially change an artwork and it would visually look the same. Change a single pixel. Use a different hashing algorithm because they're more than one out there and they will produce different hash values. Resizing the artwork slightly or using a different hash 10 and basically the hash chain is something it includes metadata but if you change the metadata you get a different hash value at the end of the day. So you could include different information but essentially the artwork that's meant to be forming the basis for this NFT visually speaking is identical and yet you can still create essentially different different NFTs that are unique in that sense. All right. So that's part of the problem. Now if artists can do that it's also true that you can mint an NFT for an artwork that you yourself did not create. Okay. Obviously this is problematic. We talk about it from property law perspective but even from copyright. Generally what happens if I create an artwork I receive the copyrights in it. Why? Because it's my own creation. It's original. I exercised my intellectual mind to create it and as a result the copyrights are assigned to me as the author of that artwork. But with NFTs and minting I don't have to have the original to mint an NFT and obviously this creates huge issues and this is actually something that happened to an artist called Corbin Rainbolt. He's a digital artist and he tweets a lot about his artworks and what he discovered actually through a lot of his fan base they tweeted him and they said oh I see that you're selling some of your artwork as NFTs and he's like that's not me. The problem with this as well is that currently there's no central authority for you to go to for any grievances that you have in this regard. So there's no recourse. The only thing that he could do was essentially to take all of his artwork down and then re-upload it with a digital watermark to prevent it from being stolen. So I'm gonna go into now a bit of a short legal analysis to try and like how do we analyze NFTs from the perspective of law? And I'm gonna use a digital artwork in the example when we talk about this but we can look at it from three perspectives. So the first one being embedded on a medium. Now your classic example of this would be paint on canvas, okay? For purposes of this example let's assume that all digital artwork is on a medium and I say this because sometimes there's this misconception also that digital artwork exists without a medium but the point here being it has to be stored somewhere and that somewhere is always going to be physical. Even on the cloud there's still going to be a server somewhere or whatever that is storing that artwork, okay? Or often you need some kind of medium to display it. You either need to print it you either need to show it on a screen somewhere. The point being to completely separate it from this idea of a medium is probably artificial in that regard, okay? Then you can look at it from the perspective of copyright. So one of the rights in the copyright bundle is the exclusive right to make copies. Another one is just communicating it to the public so making it available to the public and such. And normally what happens is the copyright will be held by say the author or the creator of the artwork unless it is specifically assigned to someone else. So that is something that, okay, if I create an artwork in order for you to have any of the copyrights I would have to assign it for you. Normally that's done through some form of license a contractual agreement between yourself and myself. And then the last one is as pure information, okay? Another perspective that we can look at digital art. So an NFT essentially embodies neither the first perspective nor the second. Okay, why? Does anyone wanna hazard a guess there? You see, the problem with NFTs is that we spoke about it being essentially a digital fingerprint when we're looking at hashing, okay? Which means that the artwork itself is often not in the NFT. You basically have the NFT which is representative of the artwork and essentially has a fingerprint too to verify that it is that artwork but it's not the artwork itself, okay? So that's the first one in that, well, it's more abstract in nature then. The second one also was the copyright perspective, right? Okay, so unless the copyright is specifically assigned in the NFT, the person who purchases an NFT wouldn't have any of the copyrights. As we've often discussed in this, okay, artists will often assign copyrights to an NFT but the problem here is how much of that? Is it in perpetuity? Would someone always have the copyrights? So what happens if I buy an NFT and then what happens to the person buying it after that or further on? We'll get to that in a little bit. So essentially an NFT actually represents the pure information aspect that I mentioned, the perspectives that we were talking about because it's not the artwork itself, it's a representation or a fingerprint to the artwork and you don't actually acquire the copyrights unless it's specifically assigned to it. And the problem with pure information is that it's not subject to property at all or copyright. Mere ideas are not protected by copyright, only the expression of them. If I have a narrative of a book in my head, I do not have copyright until it's actually written on a piece of paper or typed up on a computer. Okay, so no property rights can exist when it's an abstract idea or pure information. So then the question actually comes in, so what does the purchaser of an NFT actually acquire from a legal perspective? What do you guys think? I mean, based on what I've just kind of told you, I'm curious to know what do you think the purchaser of an NFT acquires? Yeah, okay, very good. So essentially, a right of display, yeah. And even that is essentially a little bit vague, it's not particularly clear, yeah. Of what though? You see, remember the NFT itself doesn't contain the artwork. And I'm just talking about the NFT. Not the artwork it's linked to, but I'm just talking about the NFT. Yes, true, to that specific artwork or that digital copy of that artwork, okay. But, and it is unique to that, but it's not the artwork itself though. This is where the issue lies actually, essentially. This is why it gets highlighted in this example, okay. So it looks more like some form of vague license to display or exhibit. But even that is often limited, particularly in copyright. What kind of copyrights do the authors or the artists actually want to give? Often it's not, it's limited. Sometimes you're not allowed to publicly display the work, it's more just a private display in your own home that you're limited to. Because why the artist just doesn't necessarily envision or want you to be able to display the artwork wherever you want in the public, and that's part of the copyright right, communication or making available to the public, okay. So this is what, so we talked about this now. It's a license to display. And herein lies another problem from a legal perspective, okay. If it is a license to display, remember what I said earlier about contract law. Now contract law also has another principle or doctrine called privity of contract. Meaning that a contract only binds the parties to that specific agreement, okay. If I entered into a sale agreement with any of you to say buy this clicker, so I paid you money and I bought this slide clicker from you. And if I had paid that money and then you hadn't given me the clicker, it would be absurd for me to go to someone else and demand the clicker from them. Why? Because they went party to the agreement. Obviously that's absurd. But then the question comes in is that well, if all you are actually acquiring is a license to display and what is a license? A license is a contract. It is an agreement between people. What happens to subsequent purchases of an NFT if all you have is a license? And technically that license is only binding on the original people that were party to the agreement. That then becomes the question because not many artists want to grant copyrights in perpetuity going for the rest of time, so to speak. And also their rules around copyright in the sense that they are limited in time. They do not necessarily last forever. They enter into the public realm eventually. So in that sense, then an NFT also starts to lose value even if you have been given the copyrights in that regard because eventually those copyrights won't be valid anymore. So it's a very interesting one in that sense because the question then comes in again, what do you actually acquire and if it is this vague license, it still ends up from a legal perspective being problematic when one tries to consider well, subsequent purchases, what do they actually get? Do they get the same copyright? And even then that's gonna be limited in time. So anyway, that's where I wanted to actually end today just because I wanted to highlight some of the legal issues that come in with regards to NFTs. I am not for one moment saying that NFTs are bad or anything like that. They have a use clearly. We've seen that in the way that artists are able to use them in the context. Beeple, for example, he had a great online following and as a result of that, he was able to leverage that following to get basically sell an NFT for $69 million. Fantastic to him, well done. But I do wanna point out some of the legal issues with regards to NFTs because a lot of people just think NFTs, oh wow, they're so valuable and going, but it's still problematic to view an NFT as property in the traditional legal things. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. So what I gathered is you get bragging rights and that's it. I would invite both of you to answer some questions from the audience. We have some time. So if you want to pick their brains, now would be the best time to do it. Yeah, okay, we can start with you. Thanks. Hi, I'm Emil. Thank you for your presentation. I was particularly interested by your mention of IP law. So for a project, I'm generating new crypto punks. So I'm taking the original 10,000 punks, feeding them into an implementation of some generative algorithms. The output, if I choose to mint them, do I own them? Do the people that wrote the algorithm own them? Or is this some inherent property of those time-made original crypto punks? So it's a very good question and I'm gonna use the example of Beeple in the context of here. So when he minted the first, the everyday's first 5,000 days as an NFT, okay? He obviously used a smart contract which also points out to one of the issues of calling a smart contract smart because he then assigned himself as the owner or the author, okay? Why it's not a smart contract is because in contract law, you can't contract with yourself and if he was the only party to the contract, then it's not a contract at all. But essentially, particularly in artworks, you can assign yourself as the author or the owner when you first mint it, if that makes sense. So from a property law perspective, you could assign yourself as the owner. Whether the law would necessarily recognize ownership in the traditional sense, that's a different question. But it doesn't stop you from assigning yourself as owner in that regard. Can I follow up on the question? Yeah. What is a DMA? Digital Market Act takedown, such as song owners that they think they're done. For example, that happens on Twitch, you know? When people play music on Twitch, where they have to pay royalties for, Twitch takes that down using this act. I mean, can that not be applied? I used the example of a rain cover and he... Yeah, I was wondering... So basically what he did was he contacted the platforms where the NFTs were being sold and they did take them down. But the problem was that some of the artworks had already been sold, even though they weren't his. And here I'd like to introduce kind of the twist of it because I'm not copying original artwork. I'm generating new ones with similar features. And is that still subject to a DMA? I think that you want to stay away from that. Thank you. A copywriter really comes down to how similar. And that's always going to be then actually a factual thing that ends up being decided by a court. And that's why courts always say we deal with it on a case-by-case basis. And the classic answer from a legal perspective is always, it depends. Sorry. So this might seem stupid, but like how are the NFTs actually purchased? Like are they bought with dollars or with Ethereum? I think it depends. Depends, okay. So for example, on NBA Top Shots, you can buy NFTs and it's purely with dollars. So it's super easy. So it had method option very quickly. But most NFTs you have to buy with cryptocurrency. So you have to get a wallet, then you need to go to a cryptocurrency broker, get cryptocurrency on your wallet and then you transfer. Okay, so like is there like an intrinsic value of the NFT related to a currency in the real world or there isn't? Like how do we calculate the value of an NFT? That's a $100 million question. We don't know. So I think a big part to it is social buzz. Like how many people are actually interested because economics we usually say, a thing is worth as much as people are willing to pay for it. Sounds like the cat is biting itself in the tail, but it's really what it is. If all of my one million Twitter followers want to buy it and there's scars, price is gonna go up. And of course, there also like a storage of cryptocurrency. So there's this interaction. Cryptocurrencies go up and go down. If I have an NFT that's valued in cryptocurrency, I have this thing and then the cryptocurrency goes up. I earn money through that, if that answers your question. And there's also a follow up there. I heard you summed up some advantages of NFTs, but I didn't hear new technology can be quite disruptive. Do you see one of you some disadvantages of NFTs? So from the legal side, one of the assumptions is often that NFTs will be, and that the legal aspects are ripe for disruption. That's one of the assumptions that often get made. The problem, like I said, though, is that it's actually very difficult or doesn't map very well from just the technology side into the legal side. Okay, that also doesn't mean that the legal side necessarily has to be disrupted in that regard. Obviously, law tends to lag behind the development of technology as we all know that. But at the same time, that doesn't mean that principles in law that have stood for so long and the reason that they've stood and haven't been changed is because they're wise the way they're applied in terms of how they're applicable doesn't mean we kind of throw that whole concept. So we still look at it from that perspective, and I think the danger here is with the NFT mania side is getting so hyped up and such that you don't actually take account of, well, would it be beneficial to actually disrupt the legal system in this regard? We actually need to take a moment and take stock and actually gauge whether or not we want to develop the law in this area. Because in particular, it would have huge issues, particularly around property law, which have been established for ages. And so in order to disrupt that area, we need to be really convinced before we essentially go that route, if that makes sense. Yes. There's a question behind you. Hi, I was wondering for you, do you think due to the popularity that they're gonna change some laws in certain countries? Interesting question. I mean, do I actually think they're popular? Yes, currently, do I think they will be? I'm not actually so sure in that regard. I mean, we've already seen a huge decrease in the prices of NFTs already. So there was an initial hype, the same way there was an initial hype around cryptocurrencies in general. So at this stage, no, I don't think so. Do I think NFTs have promising applications for artists? Yes, but they're not infallible, is what I would also say they, yeah. All right, and if I can ask one more question, can we read your research somewhere? Yeah, of course. I can tell you the name and you can Google it, or I can just send it to you, I don't know. Yeah, that's it. It's public, so yeah. All right. But I wanted to, there have been large changes. For example, there's things called initial coin offerings. So you give out a coin to fund your business, for example, your NFT project. And there have been countries who said we don't want that. And there are countries who said, hey, we all do that. So kind of like Singapore is really big on that. And I think so, there have been some things in that direction. It's interesting though, because is that a law change or is it basically them saying, no, we're not actually going to allow this to happen? Because in a way, it's kind of maybe even more just clarifying a legal standpoint of going, guys, our laws don't apply to crypto and therefore we're actually gonna stamp it there. So I would even argue, is that an actual change? Not so sure. I'm gonna have to stop us there. I'm glad you have a lot of questions, but we're gonna ration them. So now let's take a 10 minute break and be back here at 50. Well, let's continue. Sorry to break your conversations, but we're continuing on. I'm gonna start with a fun fact that each date, there are about 3,200 NFTs sold, which means during our little 10 minute break, about 20 were sold. Who bought them and what were they? How did they look like? Well, there are a lot of projects varying in popularity, important to different groups of people, but some of them are more valuable than others. I want to ask you to do a little quiz with me and we're gonna do it by raising your hands. Oh, wait, sorry. Again, I'm gonna have to close your eyes for a second while I do this. Ooh, ooh, okay, great, great. You didn't see anything, nothing happened. You are still not seeing anything. Yeah, this is important that you don't see it because I don't wanna give too many things away. Okay, great, okay. So I'm giving you three NFTs and I want you to guess which one had the highest latest selling price. So the last price they were sold on. Think about it good and hard, make up your mind and I'm gonna point to each one and you tell me with show of hands which one thinks the most expensive one was the first one. How many of you think the first one was the most expensive one? Okay, the second one was the most expensive one. Okay, and the third one. Okay, okay, interesting opinions. I was, some of you thought I was gonna trick you with putting up a goblin. That was the point of their collection to point out the absurdity of what people will buy but to me it's even more absurd that these are the real prices of them. So the right one is the most expensive and the left one is actually a piece of a collection that another piece of that collection is in the Mokko Museum in Amsterdam if you ever go. Check it out. For me it's personally the prettiest one but yes it's the least expensive one. So it's all in the eye of the beholder and it makes you think what out is. Is it the visuals? Is it the senses? Is it the concept? The transfer of a concept? Or is it the absurdity that people will buy a goblin for 40,000 euros? Let's see, let's talk about NFT cultures with our next speaker which is Intek Lorech. I hope I'm doing that right. She is a PhD student of socio-technological imaginaries in blockchain culture at Utrecht University and she's gonna talk about NFT cultures that will shape the cultures of our tomorrow. Okay, I keep giving away. I keep giving away. I'm sorry. It's working, I just have to untangle a little bit. Before I can start. Thank you for that introduction. So yeah, my PhD on blockchain imaginaries, socio-technical is also, you can forget about that word if it's too difficult. But it's kind of situated in media studies and cultural analysis. So yeah, yet again a kind of different angle on NFTs. And when I get asked to say something about NFTs often the question is, are they good for artists? Are they gonna change the art world? And a bit more space. And so are they good for artists? And my point often is that even though clearly, I mean, we all know the story about people. Some people are making a lot of money or just a nice amount of money, also possible, right? But there are many other people involved in NFT culture, cultures, besides artists. And they all kind of pool at the technology and yeah, this phenomenon in different ways. They have different things that they want to do with it. And so yeah, this is kind of what I want to do here is really kind of show some of those different cultures. I think that could be even more. And kind of situate how they relate also to the art world. So starting with kind of a broad question. What are NFTs? Now by now we've already heard some interpretations of what they are, but I would still kind of like to see what you guys think. So I've written a bunch of options here. So are they a new form of patronage for the art? Are they a genre of art? Are they a medium for making art with? And I think this was my question that I wanted to pose to you also. Maybe we have different interpretations of what a medium is. Is it a proof of ownership? Are they investment objects? Or are they a new data stream in the digital economy? Does anyone have a preference for what would you say if this was an exam question? All of the above? Does anyone have a different idea? Is there one that's maybe not the case? Did you? Number three? All right, okay. I have one that I have most problem with, but let's go through them. So NFTs as a new patronage system. So patronage system is to be a patron of the art, right, is to support an artist or a kind of scene by buying their work or other kind of ways of supporting their kind of work. Continuing career. And an example of kind of an NFT, like a or a blockchain based form of patronage is this Pleaser DAO. And DAOs are decentralized autonomous organizations. I won't go into the technical detail there, but they're basically a way for people to kind of pool their resources and make collective decisions about where they want to invest. And in this case, which artist they want to support with their kind of pooled money. So that would be, that's the idea in the culture at least as of a patronage system for the arts. But, and this kind of holds also with the idea of blockchain, the way it came up was always kind of trying to root around kind of authorities that were there before. If you're talking about cryptocurrencies, with them you don't need banks anymore, for example. And the idea here is that you also don't need, for example, galleries anymore. But at the same time, we have the British Museum and many other museums that are selling NFTs as well. So they are kind of, they are the traditional middleman that are also using NFTs as a form of patronage for the museum, let's say, maybe not directly for artists, but for the art world in general. So it's a way that you can kind of donate or support a museum. So I would be curious how you think about this as well. But there's at least people thinking that it is a patronage system. NFTs as a genre, this is the one I have most problems with because, well, I took a screenshot of OpenSea which is one of those platforms where you can find NFTs. And just under their art section, there's the first three that show up. This is completely random, right? Or I don't know what their algorithm is that shows the first three. I would have a hard time defining a unifying kind of aesthetic among these three. And this is also something that Domenico Quaranta who writes a lot about NFTs, he said that there is nothing that identifies and unifies all works of art, all works collected under the definition of crypto art, other than the fact that they are tokenized on the blockchain or that they have been created by a self-styled crypto artist. And what he also has an issue with is these terms, crypto art, NFT art, blockchain art, they're all kind of used interchangeably but we don't really know what we're referring to. Often I do think like kind of in common like speech, they are used as genres but I don't know, that's, I would say they're not a genre. But yeah, there's the sense I think in how people think about NFTs to see them as a new genre of art which I think is debatable. Then as a medium, so this I guess is where legal terms and my common person language differs maybe a bit because I'm thinking about yeah, what is the medium of an NFT in the sense of is it a painting, is it photography and stuff like that which I guess has something to do with where it's stored as well. So this NFT, if I would have to describe the medium of this NFT, Melting David by Trippie Michelangelo, I would say that if I took a broad definition of the whole history of this thing coming into being, it's a sculpture, it's a picture of a sculpture and it's then also a digital graphic on top of that but the NFT is not part of the medium here because if I only took that, if I only look at that image, it doesn't change whether or not it was sold as an NFT or yeah, if it was minted as an NFT, the image, the artwork stays the same. So in this case, I would say the NFT is not the medium but and this is where I had a question. There's also work that kind of pulls the NFT, the hash of the NFT into the artwork and generally that is generative art or generated art. Stuff that keeps generating is generative art but this I think is more generated. At the moment of minting this particular NFT, it looks at the hash that is created and feeds that into the algorithm to kind of, yeah, wait, maybe I should start from the other side. Jan Robert Leegte, he is the artist of this work and he made basically rules for a whole series of artworks to exist. This is number 249 and it's all about the square should look, they should have these shades of gray, they should be centered in the middle but the hash of the NFT actually determines how many squares there are, how close together they are, those kind of things. So if you see the series, there's also all sorts of different kind of compositions. So here I would say the NFT is actually playing a part in the medium. So I hope we can discuss later also like would this change the legal status and I think this is also something that kind of pulls at a history or refers to a history in art world. For example, Solovit who made this wall drawing number 95 in 1971, which was not the wall drawing itself but was instructions for a museum to make the wall drawings. So you can see like it has to have so many lines on the walls and have to be drawn in this way. So just like the algorithm in this case, there the instructions allowed for the art to kind of come to life, I guess. And then proof of ownership. This is something that already came up of course that the NFT is not the artwork. The NFT is the thing that points at it and the proof of ownership, authenticity. Sometimes I leave those very precise terms to the lawyers but in a sense, the NFT kind of points to the not artness of the NFT, right? It is, this is what Ryder Rips kind of played with, the nothingness of the not artness of an NFT. And so he made a one by one pixel PNG that was Transparence, which I put there and I put a frame around so you know where it is. And yeah, I find this is a very interesting work that kind of critiques and kind of reveals something about NFTs and they're, yeah, they're kind of the way they, yeah, what people talk about isn't necessarily an NFT. And Jonas Lund even went kind of more on the contract side of the NFT. And he kind of, this is a series of NFTs, this one's called Down to Earth there, but it's a whole kind of series of different agreements that people make. If you buy this NFT, you may not travel by airplane or business for business or pleasure for a year. There's also in perpetuity down there. So this, I am not sure how this is enforced or checked but he's kind of, you know, making people aware of what actually is an NFT. And it is really about these agreements about contracts between people. And this also is actually nothing so new because the way that we saw earlier, also, if a museum then showed or painted that wall drawing that he instructed, he also gave them a certificate of authenticity. Like this isn't just any drawing, according to my instructions, this is a certified one. So this kind of contract art is something that has existed for several decades already. Oh yeah, let's get back one second. Because I promised that I was gonna talk about more than art and more than art world. Up to now I've basically talked about the art world but yeah, I think there are already starting, there are already starting to see kind of different ways that people engage with this thing called an NFT even within that scene. But something that also came up earlier already, the virtual world, I think is a good first step outside of the strictly speaking art world. So the Central End is one of those virtual world where people kind of come together online and interact with each other. But as humans we want to kind of convey our identity, who we are, what we stand for, what we like, we don't like. So just like clothes in the real world communicate a part of that. Also in the virtual world you can buy sneakers or band T-shirts or any of those things. So this is really something that people think could be a big kind of use case for NFTs. Of course as we see kind of the metaverse becoming bigger business, so to say, with Facebook jumping in last year, the expectation kind of is that this, that we, I hear sometimes people saying like we're all gonna be in these virtual worlds and that's gonna be the dominant way of interacting. I'm not so sure about that, but I mean, for certain people that's particularly kind of people that like to game, this is not so outrageous. Then as investment objects, and this also already came up of course, but what I think is interesting is really the connection between selling art as an artist on these very fluctuating and very hyped kind of markets. So people already kind of set the stage with the 69 million sale that he did. But art and finance have always been intertwined. This is, again, it's really nothing new. Art has always been a way for people with access, yeah, access resources to kind of buy something and try to speculate on it, sell it for a higher price. And with NFTs that has just made easier, I guess. And why it's so interesting as an investment object is of course that these whole kind of, the communities that get created through a lot of marketing and a lot of kind of famous people being involved in a lot of hype kind of produce a baseline that is not to be trusted. Basically, you said it also in a Q and A a little bit, like if you sell your artwork for 10 ETH one day, but the price of an ETH rises the next day, then your artwork kind of rose in value as well. That's nothing to do with the artwork or you or your career. But it can also, of course, go the other way. And this is to the moon is a phrase that people often use to kind of say, well, this NFT, this blockchain project is going to the moon, this crypto coin, it's rising in value, you should buy it now, like get in on it because you're gonna get rich. But the fact of the matter is also that people, like you can make money on with financial speculation also betting against something. So that's, it's all relative, like the moon could also be down for someone. So this is just to say it is for a sector that is already so precarious to art world, it is a highly unstable ground to base your income on, I would say, and then the last one, NFT as a data source. And this is one that I am not really hearing a lot of people talk about, but I think it might become more of a topic in the years to come. People often say that on the blockchain, you're anonymous, you're not traceable, you can do anonymous transactions. But also stories come out that people that do like illicit things on the blockchain also, the police find them and know how to kind of trace them. So that's already kind of debatable, whether you're anonymous. But with these profile pictures that I showed earlier, the crypto punks and those kind of things, especially with the board apes that people are using as profile pictures on their Twitter and Twitter has this new verification system that you can, you get a check if that is actually or it's a hexagon if it is really your NFT. This, of course, makes it much more easy to see the kind of legal identity or the real name of someone in connection to a wallet address. So once these things kind of become more normal, get kind of normalized in culture, that has major effects also for the anonymity of the crypto world basically. And I would expect as economy works that there would be business models, there would be scamming models also based on that new possibility. And so that's something that's another kind of, yeah, chaotic force I would say for the art world if you're using one of the major cryptocurrencies. So what to think of NFTs? I mean, I would say like any technology, NFTs are not neutral and they are certainly not innocent. There is way too much money involved and many different people want to kind of use that for their own profit. So being someone that kind of engages with the art world a lot and talk with artists that are involved in this, I am anxious for like how that's gonna turn out and whether the art world is gonna be more precarious because of it's, so tread with care would be my advice. Nope. Thank you. So we saw a lot of, I think in this presentation, showed us a lot of prices and I forgot to tell you, I wanted to tell you while I switched the slides. Madonna's too expensive one was 180 Ethereum and the Doodle that is on sale so you can buy it is, well, they're asking for 5,000 Ethereum so be quick before somebody outbids you. And now we welcome our final speaker who was my professor of logic, introduction to logic and philosophy, Nathan Wildman. He also teaches digital aesthetics and he has a lot of interests of research. Yes, which are interactive fiction, metaphysics, philosophy of language, aesthetics and video games. I wanted to read those because they are so amazing and I want you all to please welcome Nathan Wildman. Okay, cool. Is that working? Can you all hear me okay? Nice. Give me just one second while I casually try not to break this. I almost did at the last one of these that I was at so it was very good. We'll just do that. Okay, still working okay? Beautiful. Nice to see everybody. How are you all doing? We'll sort of see you. Mostly just see a big white blob. So to be honest, what I'm gonna do is gonna cover a lot of the very similar ground as Paul did but in a slightly different way. Acknowledging, it's wonderful. So what I wanna do is talk about ownership and the ontology of art. So ontology here isn't the kind of computer science term where we might think about how to structure things or what sorts to place things in but it's the old philosophical term. That is we're literally trying to figure out what the hell something is. So one of the topics we've talked about several times is what an NFT is. And to be really honest, when I'm done you're not gonna be any wiser. But I'm gonna hopefully blow some smoke and make you feel like you learned something. That's the trick. So I wanna come at questions about NFT ownership and NFT ontology by getting a run up through traditional views in ontology of art. So that'll be the first bit. Ownership and art ontology. Then we'll talk about cool, can we transition some of that to the NFT thing? The answer's gonna be no. And then in the very end I wanna talk about NFTs and value. So this has come up a couple times already. I think it was in some of the questions and certainly in some of the discussion. So I wanna say a little bit at the end about what it might be to value NFTs, where that might be coming from and in particular different senses of the notion of value that might be in play here. So that's the plan, let's get started. So here's what I think of as ownership and this is not really a philosophy of law or a legal approach but I think this is what ownership is. It's the right to exploit. That is, if you own something you can exploit it in various different ways. Exactly how you can exploit it depends upon the kind of thing it is and the kind of things you can do. So in the ontology of art debates in aesthetics what you tend to have is a contrast between two different, we'll call it, kinds of things. And again, this is already gonna come up. We can come at this really nicely by thinking about traditional literature. This is actually a neat little book. It's an NFT book. So the author has put the book up as an NFT. It's very weird because there's 10 different copies of the book that are all literally the same except for some metadata and he sold the 10. Anyway, I actually tried to order a hard copy. It was supposed to come two weeks ago and for this, never showed up. So appropriate, the NFT guy stole my money. So let's think about the difference between a physical copy of the book, right? One that you might have in your hands if he'd actually mailed it to me, right? You might put it on your coffee table, you might read it, you might burn it, right? You might use it to clean up after the dog, anything. You can exploit the physical concrete object in lots and lots of different ways. And arguably this is what ownership for that kind of a thing is. It's being able to do that sort of thing. It's having the right to be able to do something like that to it. Contrast that with what I've got called an authored work. Now this is a little bit weird, but we can make sense of it. Imagine that we all had a copy of the book. We all had a physical copy. There's something that each one of those copies would share. Exactly what it is, it's hard to pin down. It's something like, let's call it a structure. It doesn't even necessarily have to be the same sequence of words because maybe my copy's in Spanish and your copy's in Dutch and Paul's copy's in, well I guess it'd be kind of Dutch, coming in, Afrikaans, right? But they're all in some sense the same book, right? Can we see the idea there? So what we can think of as the authored work is this sort of abstract object that's instanced in all of the physical copies. Another way to come at the same idea is if you think about traditional Western music, you can have lots and lots and lots of different performances of the very same work. So whatever that notion of work that's lying in the background there, that's what we can think of as the authored work. Now what is it to own that? Well it's again, the right to exploit it, but how do you exploit it? Well you can't like kick it or burn it or use it as a coffee table or something like this. It's not the right kind of object. Instead what you can do is you can print more copies. Maybe you can implement the same thing in a different media format. Exactly how this goes will depend on various copyright laws and things like this, but it seems very important that we pull the difference between ownership of the physical object versus this authored work apart. So Timothy Boucher owns the authored work. He wrote the book that's been multiply instanced, whereas I technically I guess own a copy. Who knows where it is? With me so far? Cool. So this is the kind of thing that comes up in philosophy of art all the time. Especially the intersection between philosophy of art and philosophy of law. We might talk about owning paintings. And of course when they say we own a painting, that's actually slightly ambiguous. It's ambiguous between owning the physical object versus owning something like the image rights. That's rough and ready. Talk to the lawyer to get something slightly nicer but you get the idea. So owning a particular painting gives you the right to view it, to display it, maybe to resell it. What it doesn't give you the right to do is make prints of it. Put it on t-shirts. Contrast that with owning something like the copyright. This is roughly parallel to owning something like the authored work. Because what can you do then? Cool, you can make prints. You can put it on t-shirts. Maybe you can figure out how to get a seven movie deal out of this. Maybe not this painting, but you see the idea. Here's the really neat thing. Copyright and the physical objects can very clearly come apart. Someone can own a particular painting and not at all own the copyright to it. They don't have the right to reproduce the image. They just have the right to display the particular image they have. Okay, cool. So again, traditional views here. We talked about it with literature. We talked about it with painting. How about when we start thinking about digital artworks? Now here is an absolutely beautiful digital artwork made by, if I may say so, one of the best digital artists currently working. So this is a piece of glitch art. What I did is I took a picture of my dog. You can't quite tell that. Right as she was waking up and then I glitched the hell out of it to produce what is this very cool, I think, image. Now, when it comes to digital works, I think basically the same principles apply. It's messier, but the same stuff still goes. Now here's one of the reasons why it's messier. Sometimes digital works are understood as services rather than as goods. They're not objects that you own that you have, but instead they're services that you've paid for. So I don't know, some of you might have been here when we were talking about streaming. This is the thing that's happening a lot with video games. It's ruining a lot of the video game industry. You no longer own a game. Instead, you're paying basically for the right to be able to play it on someone else's server. And then they can turn the server off. You didn't lose anything that you bought because you never owned the thing in the first place. But we can set those ones aside. Let's just think about the kinds where they're goods. Well, it still seems like if you own a token, an instance of the work, a copy, right? That allows for access, use of the associated digital assets, the code. You can display it. You can glitch it if you want to maybe try and make a new work. Possibly interesting questions there about generative artworks. But of course, that's still not the same as owning the authored work. Go ahead if you want. Take a picture of this with your phones, right? But I am gonna charge you for it. And then owning the authored work, again, is gonna allow for re-implementation, for reconfiguration, maybe re-instancing in other media forums, things like this. Again, I hope we can kind of see how this is just synthesizing a bunch of the stuff that we've been told before. One thing I want to mention here is a very fun, very weird legal case. So this is something I've written a little bit about. And it was a case of theft. And what was stolen was an enchanted amulet and magic mask. Don't laugh, that's what was taken. So what really happened is that we had, I think it was about 14 at the time, a 14-year-old Dutch boy was effectively mugged by two 16-year-olds. They held him at knife point and they made him log on to RuneScape and give one of them the magic amulet and enchanted mask. Now it was ruled theft, in fact, it was technically ruled robbery, assault plus theft. But here's something weird, what was stolen? There are no such things as magic masks and enchanted amulets. Sorry, don't want to ruin people's dreams. So what was actually taken? Well, it looks like it was something like access to the relevant digital objects. So we're already starting to get a grip on maybe how we could understand ownership of these digital things. It's maybe just even accessing them if they're not necessarily always on our hard drives because high powered magnets. We'll come back to the RuneScape case in a bit when we talk about value. Okay, so again the traditional views we can kind of make sense of there's this distinction between tokens and the authored works. We can push it and make it work a little bit when we start thinking about digital artworks. Some things get a little bit weird. What exactly the work is, is hard to make sense of? Is it the image? Is it the underlying code structure? What is the thing that you would actually even be credited with creating or inventing? What happens if we have generative art programs? Who owns those? There's a really interesting case that happened in Australia last year where the Australian court decided that the AI could be credited as the patent inventor but the owner was the person who ran the program. Interesting ways to try to push this back into the ontology of art. But okay, so cool. Ownership, it's the right to exploitation and it gives you different kind of rights or maybe better. It gives you different kinds of abilities depending on the sort of thing that we're talking about that's owned. Applied to concrete objects, applied to abstract objects and it's a little bit fuzzy with the digital stuff but we can make it work. Cool. NFTs, fuck all that up. NFTs do not fit into this traditional story at least as far as I can see. And here's the reason why. It's because of what they actually are. So again, this has come up a bunch so I'm just gonna say the same thing that's come up before. What is the NFT? Well, gonna put this in terms of a generic that is it will allow for some exceptions but NFTs aren't images. And NFTs aren't the copyrights to images. Probably the best way to think about them is something like an access route to an image. It's a tag. It's a pointer. It's a very particular pointer. It's a very specific. We can isolate it, reproduce it, it's perfect. There's no other way to get to that pointer other than through this very specific blockchain but that's what the NFT is. It's not the thing that you get to through it. Again, most of the time there are exceptions. So what does that mean? Well, here's one thing. It means that if you own the NFT most of the time you don't own no image. If the person who owns the hosting site that your pointer points to decides to take the image down, cool, goodbye picture, and you have no legal recourse to take it back because all you own is the pointer, my dude. Same thing too, most of the time you do not own the right to reproduce that image, to use it in other places. Maybe you own the right to display it. But even then, that's not always the case. Remember some of the cases Paul was talking about where we have artists whose work was effectively taken and turned into NFTs. This is basically taking someone's painting and displaying it in your house. Or, maybe better, is building up a very elaborate mirror system so you can always see the art they've got hanging in their house. So what is an NFT? I think it's basically just a pointer. Again, there are exceptions. Do people know whose NFT this is? Since we were playing that kind of game. So this is Seth Green, Seth Green's board ape. So he started an NFT show. Originally put on YouTube, then he isolated it down. Here was a problem, a scammer stole it from him and he couldn't make new episodes until he bought it back. Now here's the reason why that was possible. So remember I said, most of the time when you own the NFT you don't own the image rights and things like this. Board ape is an exception. Board ape says, oh hey, now if you own it, then you have unlimited worldwide license to use, copy, display the purchased art for purpose of creating derivative works. Cool, so that means if you own a board ape NFT, you can put them on t-shirts and things like this. But this is very much the exception rather than the rule. And here's the other really interesting thing. Note that this is basically just for commercial use. Nothing prevents anything about personal use and Lord help you to figure out what counts as personal use for digital files. I just happened to have them sitting on my FTP server. I can't control who accesses it. So one of the things I wanted to kind of raise here is again, I think this shows that old or traditional approach to art ontology doesn't quite map, it's not quite mappin' up. But that could just be because to go back, frankly the thing we're talking about here really isn't something like an artwork. But maybe that's unfair. The other thing I want to mention is I think thinking about NFTs this way shows why there's a problem on both sides effectively with the kind of right click save as debate. People relatively familiar with this, this was the way to troll people on Twitch or on Twitter rather. If they have an NFT, you right click, you save it, you re-upload it as a reply to them on Twitter and then it's like, dude, you stole my ape. It's like, no dude, I did not steal your ape. I copied the image for personal use. Because what would it be to actually steal the ape? I don't even know. I mean it's something like stealing the certificate that says this is my pointer to get you to the image. That's not something I can right click save as, at least most of the time. Again, there are exceptions. Strictly speaking with the apes, there's issues about having the image rights, but you can see how this goes more generally. So here's the best analogy I can come up with. I don't really like it, but it's the best one I can come up with. I think owning an NFT is very similar to something like owning the wall that the Mona Lisa hangs on, in that what you're kind of owning is a display space, the pointer, right, it gets you to the image. Of course, the image could be moved by the person who actually owns it or has the copyright over it. And importantly, owning the display space does not necessarily get you the right to exploit the image or to exploit the authored work that's behind it. Again, not a perfect analogy, but it was the best I could come up with. I've been pretty sick, so okay. So NFTs, there's a lot of fud if you haven't picked it up from me. I assume everyone knows what I mean with fud, right? Fear, uncertainty, and doubt, but okay. I'm not sure about the ontology stuff. I think it's difficult. I'm really unclear exactly how to map it anything better than something like a pointer. So maybe come back actually to something that was just in the previous talk. With regards to thinking of, I made some notes. With regards to thinking of NFTs as something like genre or medium, I'm very much in agreement. I don't see how you can actually think of them as these. I think if anything, they might be ways that genres are typically packaged or ways that you occasionally get to medium. I think the interesting ones are the kind of generative artworks. But even then, I suspect it's probably just generative artwork that's doing the heavy lifting here rather than the NFT part. Still. So let's set the ontology and ownership questions and just think about value. Is this NFT valuable? Well, that's a bad question. And that's a bad question because it's so open-ended. It doesn't make sense to just ask if it's valuable because things can be valuable for lots of reasons. Man earlier talked about wanting to have the ticket from his first concert. I still have my baseball glove from when I played Little League years and years ago. I imagine that's not valuable to any of you. It's just a worn out piece of leather. But it has nostalgic value to me. But that's not the kind of thing we're after are these things valuable. I think we're thinking of value in two specific ways. We're thinking of either monetary value or what we might call aesthetic value. Monetary value I think is straightforward as it worth a bunch. And that's beyond my pay grade to settle. Basically all you gotta do is convince enough people to buy it and then it will be monetarily valuable. A very familiar thing that comes up in this space, everyone knows about tulip mania. Everyone familiar with this? In 1634, the Dutch go crazy for tulips. And they drive up this huge bubble. By 37, the whole thing's crashed. Everyone's lost a ton of money. All just because people basically invested it with monetary value. There's an interesting question here about whether currency is just something that we're kind of making up as we go along, but we can talk about that later. Let's think about aesthetic value. Is there something aesthetically valuable about NFTs? And I think to be honest, a lot of times the answer's gonna be no. In fact, even earlier, I forget who it was, someone wrote down talking about the arts often bad. Part of the reason the arts often bad is because it is just algorithmically generated. Little tiny variations, a lot of it already starts off kinda eh and the algorithm isn't really trained to produce something that's beautiful. That's not what we care about. But still, I think there might be other ways for it to be aesthetically valuable. So one way we might come at it is to ask, is this art? And I think there's a difficulty here. And this is a long, fun, horrible debate about what it is to be a work of art. And I'm gonna pitch you two stories. One of them is a kind of formalism. So formalism, not really doing so well anymore, is the kind of view that people like. But the idea was that art are artifacts, or art works are artifacts with certain formal properties. So it will have certain maybe color distributions or dynamicity or something like this. Purely formal, just purely baked into the work. The problem with this account is if NFTs are just pointers, I do not see how they can have any of these aesthetic properties. So the answer then would be no. Here's the other one, and this is the interesting one for where we're at. Is there's an institutional theory of art. And the institutional theory basically says, hey, art is what the art world says is art. And exactly who counts as the art world is a bit hard to figure out, but you might think of people who manage galleries, people who buy and sell artworks, et cetera. Here's the really cool thing, and I think this was just touched on a second ago. That directly I think links it back up to the monetary value. There'll be incentives to make it art and make it aesthetically valuable if it's worth a bunch of money. This isn't to say I think this is bad, but again, remember, what is it we'd actually be aesthetically valuing? It ain't this picture. It's the tag. It's the pointer that got us to the picture. It's the hash. So again, as for financial value, yeah, lots of people think it's got financial value. Here's a crypto punk, right? Sold for 2.3, or Jesus, 23.7 million dollars in February of this year. And actually to go back, I think it was this one. I think this one was sold for 25 million in March. So a lot of money in these pointers, which is nice. The last thing I want to say is there's not really a problem if we think that the pointers are aesthetically or monetarily valuable. Because put really bluntly, things don't even have to exist to have monetary value. Just think about the RuneScape case. What was stolen? Magic amulet and enchanted mask. There ain't none of those. So the fact that maybe to think that NFTs have monetary and aesthetic value means some weird stuff has that. That's okay. We already buy that anyway. So that's basically me done. I hope that was interesting. And I hope you kind of come away with some thoughts about the ontology of NFTs about how there are some issues with understanding exactly what they are and still maybe even if we grant that how they could still be valuable. Thank you very much. You can leave your mic on. We have the Q&A thing now. I welcome Intebec. Thank you for the presentation. And now we can focus on your questions for our two remaining speakers. Yeah. Do we have any questions? Yeah. Okay. Sure. Well, I had a question on valuation. So in traditional finance, if you buy a stock that is a share of a company gives you the right to a share of the company's profits. And it seems to me that the valuation like this sets a ceiling, right? For like what is a minimum or a maximum value of a stock based on like a reasonable multiple. It seems to me that it's the same thing when valuing NFTs. Like if you base it only on the aesthetic value it's very hard to set a maximum or minimum ceiling. But if you base it on the rights that is connected to it, like you mentioned with the board apes it's a lot easier to find an actual value. Does this mean that we're moving towards kind of that space where you'll get like a Starbucks NFT that is like gives you the right to a cup of coffee sort of thing? I mean, I'm frankly really doubtful about that. So one reason is actually think about the kind of board apes case that you were talking about. I would think that one of the reasons why there'd be some kind of value in having the image rights for it is because of something like broadly aesthetic value, right? Or let's call it maybe broadly social value. And I think that can then maybe be re-understood. So it's kind of bootstrapping itself up. Because of that, I don't think there's gonna be a floor and I don't really think there's a ceiling either. You just get enough hype and people will buy into it. Or if the hype goes away, it ain't worth nothing. I would say it's really a lot of marketing and a lot of kind of making people believe it is valuable so that it becomes valuable, yeah. So for Nathan, do you think then maybe talking about this institutional theory that you mentioned with, it makes me think like art is, yeah, art is what the art world wants to see as art. And you see it a lot with like, yeah, people like Picasso or whatever, like all these famous paintings. It used to be like, okay, so you can buy this painting and this is for the elite, it's very special, it's worth a lot, but who made, like some people have like modern art and it's just three stripes on a painting and that's like worth millions. So do you think this is not the case like with this board Ape, for example, and CryptoPunk, that it will be like the new elitist like art, but then in a different way in the virtual world? Like that has that future as art has it, basically. I mean, I think one of the things, actually I suspect you've got lots more interesting things to say here, but my suspicion is that this is, one of the things that, and this is kind of crystal balling here as well, that what might happen is the kind of thing that tends to happen without cider art. So it starts off with a particular kind of aesthetic and maybe some social drive to it and people pick up on it and then it becomes commercialized and then it becomes big money, but a lot of the force behind it gets drained away and then it just becomes nothing, but ways to change a bunch of money around. But that's, again, that's the fud talking, that's the fear, uncertainty, and, yeah. But maybe I would add to that also, if you talk about Picasso, it was also, you know, why we remember him, it was also because he was so innovative in, you know, the aesthetics that he used, of course. And if I translate that to NFTs, then what I find interesting often is the works of art that are kind of reflecting on the technology while they're also using it to be sold, for example, but like this kind of technology art that, you know, I think the Young Obert Leichter work is kind of an example of that, that shows you a little bit what's happening behind the scene. It kind of pulls attention to the hash, but there's also work that, yeah, has some kind of rules about how owners have to engage with each other or what you can do with it, like kind of using the contract as the artwork, basically. And that is something if we, then it doesn't even necessarily matter anymore if it's sold as an NFT, but that is kind of something that I would see that could start to become recognized as an important kind of aesthetic or something that kind of looks like a genre, perhaps. Yeah, I mean, I entirely agree. But again, I think the thing that's really cool there is the kind of generative process, the fact that it's an NFT is irrelevant, right? It could just be that it feeds its own algorithm back in and runs through. That's the cool thing there, rather than that it's using a hashtag or something like this, or not a hashtag, but I. We have more questions, and then we can. Like my question was about the fact, like are there any statesmen statements or like some people properly explain why they vote an NFT? Because like I think that there are, like we kind of have traced two paths. And one is the NFT, and the other one is the digital art that it's pointing to, basically. So like I think that the second kind of business could be growing a lot. We have art generated by AI. We have art generated by algorithms. We have digital arts. And for the same purpose, it's just, maybe it's that second kind of thing of digital object that is shown in a museum of digital art. I wouldn't really know how to call it differently. But the NFT is something very different. So why would a person buy an NFT but for hype and this? Well, yeah, I was going to point to that. One of you had a Twitter, the flex. And I think more, like even more, is also to belong to a certain community. Like board apes, if you buy a board, if you get to be in the club, you know, and there's this discourse that you're a part of. And lots of NFTs have that kind of structure. Suddenly you're in a discord where Snoop Dogg also is, you know? That's cool. So I think it's a lot about community as well. I absolutely agree with that. And I think if one of the things to kind of take away is that we can pull apart this talk of digital art and making a market out of the digital art and things like this and distributing them from the NFT stuff, then cool. I think that's a nice result to my mind. Speaking from the view of earning money from NFTs or investing, isn't it worth to create them more than rather than buy them and sell them later? Who makes them? Can you explain a bit more what you mean? I mean, who makes the NFTs and who uploads them? Isn't it worth more to like create them yourself instead of buying some and selling them later for a higher price? Well, I don't know if you have a good... I was gonna say, this might be a good question for the economist. The cultural studies of the philosopher. I mean, yeah. So one thing is thinking about an issue with generating the images. So one way a lot of these images are generated is again just running some kind of algorithm to produce them. But that's not really generating the NFTs. The NFTs are the specific kinds of things on a chain. They're these hashes, they're pointers, et cetera. What's the value there? Well, you kind of gotta get people to buy in. So if you just make a ton, you're sitting on something that's not really gonna be useful. I forget, oh God. Yeah, go ahead, go ahead. I mean, one point with that also is that there's a lot of talk of like NFTs kind of democratizing the art world. Like anyone can make an NFT and sell it. You don't need any gallery or representation anymore. But if you just make an NFT, there's so many, no one's gonna notice one extra NFT that someone made. So you really need to, there's a lot of marketing to it. There's a lot of knowing the right people. Yeah, so there's still a lot of hierarchy, I would say in that space. Another kind of parallel case actually, I think that was mentioned earlier, was kind of initial coin offering or something like this, an ICO, and those only really work if you get people to buy into your coin. If it was just valuable to purely mint them, that's all people would be doing. It's just pumping them out. But the problem is to make them doesn't mean anything if nobody else gets on the train. That's the trick. All right, thank you. I'm gonna have to stop you with the questions, but we will get back to them. We're gonna invite the other two speakers for the panel discussion now. We have some questions that we were burning to ask. So we will start the discussion with those. And after that, we can fill it in with everywhere where our discussion goes. Yeah, okay, let's discuss. I have a question for all of you. Okay, I think Nathan or any, with his mind that NFTs shouldn't be seen as real pieces of art. But if art is evolving and revolutionizing in a way we cannot yet comprehend, is there a possibility where you can see it as a future art? If art, traditional art was seen as a medium where you could create something, but where a medium here becomes maybe the bragging rights, maybe the soul flex of it, maybe the things that you can use change not to be anymore, a canvas, but a different thing. Can you see it going into the tradition, ever be seen as real pieces of art? Yeah, I would point to the generative work again, but maybe you have something. I wouldn't say this beyond my competencies. Yeah, no, that's really where I, if the work that uses a bit of the actual data of the NFT in the creation of the artwork, that's to me what gets closest to the question. And there is work that does that. So you could say a particular NFTs that they are art, but that is a very, very, very small minority. Okay. Maybe one possible comparison class is if we think about conceptual art or something like this. So untitled Ross in LA, I think is a great example of this, where the work is just a pile of candy, 175 pound pile of candy, and gallery viewers are encouraged to eat the candy. And when you own or when a gallery owns the work, what they actually own is something very similar to the instructions to build it, or a little certificate saying that this pile of candy isn't just a pile of candy, it is this artwork. And that's not too far off from something like an NFT. So if more and more conceptual art gets developed, I think there might be a kind of uptake on particularly the NFT as the thing of the art, rather than just the kind of generative products or the things they're pointing you to. Yeah. It was interesting, because I actually had some friends who were studying fine art. And it's interesting we use the word pieces of art here, because also in a way I actually find that problematic. And I'm answering this funny enough as a lawyer, but more talking about, I don't know, I feel like the nature of art actually is to essentially push the boundaries of what one considers art. So in that context, very much exactly what you're saying about NFTs, if you tie it in a generative sense, then it becomes the artwork. But also that from a legal perspective, just to point out that that's also problematic, because the more something is generated by an algorithm, it means that you don't have the copyright, because you didn't actually exercise, it's not yours as an original, you didn't create it, an algorithm did. The code for the algorithm would be subject to copyright, but the product of the algorithm wouldn't be. But can I ask, so who did the Mona Lisa, the brush or the artist? Good point, but okay, if I, for example, using the algorithm there, just to use an example, often when you have that kind of art, it uses data, inputs, in order to generate an artwork at the end of the day. Yeah, but the parameters for the data have been, I would say very rarely would an NFT, like collective use some data that belongs to somebody else or that I don't know is just sand at the sea to generate the collection. Yeah, I'm more just talking about the data that's input. So who do you identify as the author in a copyright sense? Is it the person who selects the data and inputs it into the algorithm that then generates the artwork? Or is it the person who wrote the algorithm, the person who wrote the code? See, this is just a debate that comes up in the legal sense, not being able to identify well, who's actually the true author of the end product at the end? But why is, cause that's actually the question we're asking, like why is an algorithm different than a brush? Like it is, the artist is using that thing to make an artwork. Why is it legally different? Because it's not always the artist that makes use of an algorithm, for example, to generate something. So that's the person they create an algorithm, particularly in order to create the art. And now we're talking about it more in a general sense and probably getting sidetracked. No, but it's, sorry. So in information systems, computer science, economics, people say, you know, it's a system, it's made by man. If your program doesn't run, it's not the program's fault, it's your fault, the program is. The problem is always in front of the screen, it's never behind the screen. So it's in a way techno-deterministic. You can tell it what you do. I mean, you can insert some random element, sure. Like you made a good example with, you know, with the hashing that determines what it looks like, but still it's deterministic. So maybe just to kind of chip in, cause this is something I've been thinking about a lot recently, stable diffusion stuff. People have probably seen these recently. Again, generative kind of programs for art, where in this case, the real fun one is you put in text and it spits out a picture. Here's something people have been getting mad about, is other digital artists copying their inputs. So they're basically saying, hey, my artwork was finding out the right kind of way to push the algorithm to do something. If we kind of buy that, then I think it is just a brush. But I'm not really sure that that's a super good argument, but I just want to flag it up, because I think it's an interesting kind of parallel there with within the people who are already on the side of like, this is generating new works, and the person who's running the algorithm is genuinely producing something. There's a kind of weird tension even internally there, I think. You get the audience in? Yeah. There was a question there. Me and Leonardo da Vinci have the very same brush with the same colors and stuff. Good for you. The results will be very different, but if I have the same data in the same algorithm, and we put inside the same data, me and Mark Zuckerberg or whoever, NFT artist will produce the very same image. So it's kind of different in that way, I think. It's the way you use that brush. If you use it in a very specific way, it's easier to get to the same results. Like, whether for physical art form is almost impossible. Right, so it should be attributed to you and not to like the tool, right? Yeah, yeah, of course, of course. Yeah, but that speaking for the brush made art piece, not for the algorithm. Well, same goes there, right? I mean, Mark Zuckerberg has Python, I have Python. He can do much cooler things than I can do with that. Yeah, but like, I was imagining a situation in which two people have the same data and they input the same data in the same algorithm and then the output would be the same. But it's, sorry, it's really not about inputting data. It's about creating code that does something with, I don't know, pixels. It's not like I put in Excel because let's say data in the simplest form is in Excel. It's a spreadsheet. It's not like getting it from somewhere, putting it in, making something. It's really what the human has created in the code what determines. The interesting thing there is you are placing the art and that's actually not part of how a lay person can use the same algorithm and produce the same output with essentially not having any role to play in the creation of the algorithm to begin with. And the algorithm, the writer of the algorithm, I'm sorry, the writer of the algorithm, so the person who creates the algorithm, they have copyright in respect of the algorithm, the code. They do get that already. The question is, should they get more rights in the product that's created as well? And that's up for debate essentially. That's what I'm talking about because essentially I have the exploitation rights in respect of that algorithm. I can market it and give it to other people and then they can essentially create art using my algorithm. The question is, should those people hold copyright in the products even though they had nothing to do with the creation of the algorithm itself? So anyway, I just wanted to clarify that point. I'm sorry, I have to stop you there just a little bit. I feel like we're going in a different, in a new loop now of, yeah, but, yeah, but. I want to ask you, you told us about you being in a discord with Snoop Dogg, if you own board AYPS Yacht Club. You also get some other rights, such as our rights to property in the metaverse or to buy things in the metaverse. If we shift our world to metaverse, at least in a fun way, in a not so far future, interact or even living in a virtual space could become the norm for many. What role will NFTs play in such a metaverse? And can you right-click save in the metaverse? I don't think it would ever become the norm. We are always, you know, also, I would say first physical beings, right? So I'm having questions about, like, how widespread that would become. I think it would be more like subcultures. But, yeah, that's my idea. But I do think that NFTs basically make it possible for something like the metaverse to grow, because through NFTs, you can kind of, you know, identify yourself and become an individual there. So maybe in NFTs, there's a sort of like, you had your cards and you had your letter of love. There's a collector's kind of way, like got to catch them all Pokemon kind of way. I guess so, kind of. Because if you imagine that something is really scarce, so there's only, I don't know, 1,000 of these boots that you can wear in the metaverse, it creates a community among these people. Imagine the festivals, like the music festivals in the Netherlands, Belgium, whatever. You get these laces around your arm, right? You recognize people on campus who have that. You know, you start chatting with them, you feel connected to them, kind of, you know, you made the same experience. If you meet somebody in the virtual space who has a thing that's scarce and that she has and you have, I mean, it creates something, right? And isn't that too dissimilar from what we see in the offline world? I mean, like, for example, when I play Warcraft online, I have this tag in my name. And I've seen other people have the same tag in their name. So it was like, hey, this must be a cool guy, cool girl. I agree with all of that. I guess I just don't see why it has to be NFTs. Because, I mean, I mean, I can do the same festival laces. I can literally weave it myself. But there is something, I'm sure, that you can use to identify whether it's genuine or fake. You can look in the metadata and see, is it minted by Yuga Labs or not? And that is for everybody visible. And if it's not by Yuga Labs, well, then I don't like it. I would think also more in terms of, like, the economy involved in creating such a thing. I mean, I mean, I can do the same festival laces. I'm involved in creating such a space. So because NFTs exist, there is an economy around it, and these things get made. So that's what I mean, you know, NFTs make it possible for something like virtual worlds to become bigger, because otherwise I would think who is going to, you know, invest in it to make it real. Something that I also just wanted maybe to add, and it links to the scarcity argument. Sometimes that is one of the reasons why we find something valuable. And going back to, you know, use Warcraft as an example. But I don't know if, you know, Nathan, I don't know if you've also heard of how the problem is adoption. So I don't know if you guys know, but there were some people who play Minecraft and build there, and they actually tried to sell the map seed for their Minecraft map, which has all their builds on it as NFTs. And basically, Mojang essentially put a stop to that. They said, sorry, this is not something we're actually going to allow. So then it becomes a situation of adoption. And so what role can NFTs play? Well, if people don't adopt it or allow it in certain circumstances, it won't be able to play a role. Okay. Now you can ask some of the questions as well. If you, yeah, I saw some of the hints and I want to take advantage of that. No, I just wanted to maybe add, like, in my opinion, I think the role the NFTs will have is that you can really prove the ownership of something, right? So without NFTs, you can have Nike shoes in the metaverse, for example. But with NFTs, you can actually prove that they're given from Nike or that they're made from them. And I think without it, there isn't really, maybe there are, but I doubt there's another way to really do that in the way that NFTs can do it. I mean, as a cheap example, God, what's the online, the most recent Diablo game? It's something like Diablo Immortal. There's a huge problem with fake orbs, right? And there's no NFTs involved in this. Orbs are some kind of thing you use. It's a free-to-play game, right? Bunch of people bought them on the cheap from certain institutions that basically farmed them all the time. Blizzard's cracking down on it massively. And they don't have to use NFTs to tell which ones are good or bad. They can just look in the program for the game. The same kind of thing generally with the metaverse. If we actually mean the metaverse, like the one that Meta's making, they'll be able to see. We don't need NFTs then. Correct. Everybody sees. Not only Blizzard. But then why think there's going to be anything like us to be able to slip between one platform and another and maintain stuff? This is the trick. I take it. Would you mean my dad? As in, right. So I've got some goods that I can use in World of Warcraft. I can't use them in Diablo online. I've got some stuff in RuneScape. I can't use them in World of Warcraft. Right. But if Blizzard decides to take down Diablo, if Wizard of the Coast decides to take down magic together online, your cards are gone, your items are gone. But if NBA Top Shots decides to take down NBA Top Shots, it's still on your wallet, even if it's just a pointer. Even if it's just a pointer. And that pointer still has a history. If that pointer has been owned by Michael Jordan, even if this artwork is gone, this is going to be 11010 years. Obviously I'm exaggerating. But there's a difference. But no, then it's not the thing it's pointing to. Again, if the thought was it's something about the good that it's getting us to, then we're not really concerned with the good we're getting us to anymore. Does that make sense? Do you see the... So that was why I was kind of worried. I wanted to ask one of the questions we had. It was recent. We said that it's very dynamic and it changes. It can go... It can be a hype. It cannot be a hype. It can go to the moon and back and the other way around. Recently, NFT prices have dropped dramatically by 92 since the beginning of May. What does this say about the NFT market? Does it show that NFTs really are over-hyped? Or just that there are fluctuations in everything? I mean, well... Do you want to say... A very short answer from finance would be the efficient market hypothesis. All the information are priced into a good. For example, if I know NVIDIA is bringing out a good chip, then the stock is going to rise because the information that it's going to be a good product is in the price of the stock. A simple explanation would be not all the information about the NFTs are priced in because we would not be standing here if we had all the information about NFTs. People thought this is awesome, this is going through the roof, but the truth is far from that. And as soon as that became clear, boom, everything crashed down. Of course, there are other pieces. Well, it's got hacked, some scams, distrust in the system. It's really multifaceted, but I think it's a big part of this information, what people believe, what it turns out to be, something like that. I would say that the market crashing... Okay, that's one thing, but it's stabilizing in a more kind of humane level that is not these insane prices. An NFT market that is kind of just, has a horizontal line rather than this kind of line. That would be good for the arts because then you can build a career on it if you know that this is something that in 10 years you can trust that it still has value and it hasn't crashed. So I think more detrimental to the arts world is the hype rather than the kind of settling of the space. I always seek hands and then I don't see at the moment where I want to engage, do you want to ask something about this particular topic? Yeah? No, you don't have to. Anything? I'm just curious about your opinions on the museum's NFTs. Because for the museum, first of all they have the physical one, then they have the digitized version and then they sold out this kind of service. So should we value them equally or should we attach more value to the physical one or the digital one or the service? Yeah, as we know as the NFTs. And also some of them also sold out those NFTs of the work including something that's already in the public domain. So that would also raise legal issues. So I want to know your opinions. I mean I would be very hesitant to answer that should with any firm commitment there. In part because I think that's very much up to how we want to understand the relevant notion of value. If we mean aesthetically, cool. Maybe there's different things to be said here. When we're thinking about the physical work there'll be certain properties we want to pay attention to. The brushwork, how it's maintained, how it's lasted. When we're thinking about the digital one we might be very interested in say how it works on particular systems or how it was actually encoded. We think there about the underlying digital object and how it captures the image perfectly the physical one perfectly. So again different features would be different kind of important for the valuation there. As for the service I'm not sure but I think there would be things that we might be interested in there too. Which one is the most valuable? I don't know. That's beyond my pay grade to say. But I think that's sort of how I would come at that. Okay. If there are any questions I'm going to thank our speakers for today. I'm going to thank each and everyone of you for adding a new perspective to this topic and for guiding us through the whole experience of what an NFT is. I hope we'll be lucky in our ventures with the digital art or not art. And yes, I ask you all for a big applause for our speakers. I'm just going to ask you at the end to oh now I'm still in the staging to fill out a one-minute survey of how it was and I want to leave you with the final words of thank you for listening. I hope you have a good luck with art if you're wondering what it is. If it's a visual, if it's a sense, if it's a story, if it's a concept maybe it's just them selling you something even if it is air or a picture of air. That's it. Thank you.