Comment by le_isms
4 years ago
As much as HN hates NFTs, they could really help solve this problem. Decentralized online digital ownership is a great use case.
4 years ago
As much as HN hates NFTs, they could really help solve this problem. Decentralized online digital ownership is a great use case.
NFTs don't let you include the movie itself as a payload, so they are just a token that gives the owner to a claim to a movie via some external system. In this case, there is no disagreement that the consumer purchased the movie, just a refusal to honor that purchase. An NFT that said you bought a movie is meaningless if the system streaming the movie to you to stops honoring it. It's no different than what is happening here.
> so they are just a token that gives the owner to a claim to a movie via some external system.
Yes, but that's exactly what you don't get with a central database. There is no way to use your Sony-database-entry to access the movie from whoever holds the rights right now. Companies also go out of business or change plans, so that central database will cease to exist in the future anyway.
With an NFTs you have a proof of ownership. You still would need a service to honor your NFT token, but NFT usage would be the very thing that makes those services possible to exist in the first place.
We have seen with MP3 that this can work, just in that case the MP3 itself was used as the ownership token to move content to other services. With movies that doesn't work, as companies don't even give you a raw file of a movie, but they might be willing giving you NFTs, as those don't circumvent the DRM measures they have in place.
Either way, NFT are of course only a small piece of the puzzle here, there is a lot of supporting infrastructure that would need to be build and that nobody is building right now. And given the energy usage and cost of blockchains, it's not really usable for your $3 movie anyway. So it's not a workable solution at the moment. But even with all it's faults, it's still the closest thing to a possible solution for digital ownership that we have.
> We have seen with MP3 that this can work, just in that case the MP3 itself was used as the ownership token to move content to other services.
In the early 2010s or so, companies like Amazon, Google Play Music, etc briefly offered the ability to scan your MP3 collection to instantly get access to your music via their library as a way to suck you into your ecosystem.
It was neat, but all of these services have since switched off because it was just a means to get you hooked on their platform. It all went away because there was no on-going business case to support it . Now all that remains are a few scattered "digital locker" services where you are just streaming your own files back to yourself instead of using them to unlock a music library. Otherwise, you are locked into replacement streaming platforms with the same limitations as before.
The point is that NFTs solve a problem that already has other solutions - keeping track of who paid for something is relatively easy. The hard part is actually providing the product that was purchased in perpetuity. NFTs don't yet have an answer to the harder part of the problem that is profitable for a business.
Sorry, we don't accept Sony Media NFTs, you need a Sony Xperience Plus NFT. The old ones were phased out last year.
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HN hates NFTs because of 'self evident' statements like this, it's seen as little more than micro-hype statements to up the value of something seen as useless.
NFTs do not solve this problem, the content has been removed. If you feel they do, feel free to explain how it would have helped in this situation.
Only in theory - multiple streaming services would have to be licensed rights to the movie, so that if PlayStation revoked your right to watch it, you could use the NFT in another service like Netflix. This is unlikely to happen with big Hollywood movies cause of their tight IP laws.
NFT could be applied to movies in new ways[1], but probably not in the way of limiting access to the file.
[1] https://www.billboard.com/pro/camp-chaos-songcamp-nfts-50-pe...
How does that help when the google drive link on your NFT goes offline?
Don't mean to seem like I'm piling on, but I sincerely would be interested how they would help here?
NFT's: Anyone can check and verify ownership.
Receipts/Credit Card statements: only people with access to the finance system and authorization to check, can verify ownership.
For some things, a common public ledger is appropriate. For everything else, there's Mastercard ..
Verifying ownership is kinda useless when the distributor no longer distributes, though.
You can prove you own a copy. Congrats. So can everyone else with a receipt. However, that doesn't somehow coerce Sony into continuing to provide access.
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It's already been brought up by many others, but proof of purchase is not the issue here, right? It's the right to access the content. NFTs don't force Sony to give you your content if they're not legally obliged to.