Two NFT Copycats Are Fighting Over Which is the Real Fake Bored Ape Yacht Club (theverge.com) 54
A pair of non-fungible token projects are testing the boundary between plagiarism and parody. From a report: Digital marketplace OpenSea has banned the PHAYC and Phunky Ape Yacht Club (or PAYC) collections, both of which are based on the same gimmick: selling NFTs with mirrored but otherwise identical versions of high-priced Bored Ape Yacht Club avatars. Now the dueling projects are selling their apes while dodging bans from other marketplaces, becoming the latest example of how the NFT world handles copied art. Bored Ape Yacht Club (or BAYC) NFTs are some of the most expensive crypto art assets -- they recently overtook CryptoPunks as the highest-priced NFT avatars with the cheapest available ape selling for $217,000. Like other avatars, though, anybody can technically copy or modify the associated ape picture. So PAYC and PHAYC simply flip the right-facing BAYC avatars to face left, associate them with cryptocurrency tokens, and resell them.
PAYC announced its launch in early December with a loose mission statement promoting decentralization and denigrating "rich douchebags" who had (allegedly) taken over the original ape market. It called back to CryptoPhunks, a similar project that flipped and resold expensive CryptoPunks images earlier this year. Early arrivals could mint left-facing apes for free starting December 28th, while others paid a fee of .042 ETH (currently around $157). PHAYC launched shortly after with a tongue-in-cheek website describing the project as "a limited NFT collection where the token itself offers no membership and no allegiance," an inversion of the promise made by BAYC creator Yuga Labs. One PHAYC community member described the project to CoinDesk as "a satirical take on the current state of NFTs and members of the NFT community who might be taking the NFT market a little too seriously."
PAYC announced its launch in early December with a loose mission statement promoting decentralization and denigrating "rich douchebags" who had (allegedly) taken over the original ape market. It called back to CryptoPhunks, a similar project that flipped and resold expensive CryptoPunks images earlier this year. Early arrivals could mint left-facing apes for free starting December 28th, while others paid a fee of .042 ETH (currently around $157). PHAYC launched shortly after with a tongue-in-cheek website describing the project as "a limited NFT collection where the token itself offers no membership and no allegiance," an inversion of the promise made by BAYC creator Yuga Labs. One PHAYC community member described the project to CoinDesk as "a satirical take on the current state of NFTs and members of the NFT community who might be taking the NFT market a little too seriously."
Now they're worried? (Score:4, Informative)
becoming the latest example of how the NFT world handles copied art.
Funny, these people have no problem stealing other artist's work [9gag.com] and trying to make a quick buck.
Re: Now they're worried? (Score:2)
Not a single nft is original. All are copies of the original. It's all complete and utter bullshit. Even more of a scam than crypto currency
NFT (Score:3)
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I could go the entire rest of my life reading about stupid NFTs, each & every time googling or hitting Wikipedia, because I still don't understand what exactly 'it' is that an NFT buyer is supposed to have 'bought'.
Propose to file such stories under "It's funny, laugh" section from now on?
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The simple answer of what the NFT buyer bought is simple. They bought a few zeros and ones that have no real world value. 8^)
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Technically what you are buying is an entry in a distributed ledger that asserts some party has transferred certain rights to you.
NFTs per se are not an inherently ridiculous technology. One perfectly sensible application would be to represent in-game property in computer games, but in a way that allows users to trade those properties outside the control and supervision of the game provider. While most game providers prefer to regulate such transactions, that is a business strategy. Other developers might
Re: NFT (Score:2)
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NFTs are not new technology. Ages ago (early 1990s), when I was part of a group of MUD admins, we were testing an inter-MUD feature which would allow players to export their characters from one MUD as a PGP clearsigned file and import them to another MUD. Each MUD had their own PGP signing mechanism. This signed file not just allowed players to copy back and forth, but would definitely keep modified MUD characters out. The feature never really went anywhere because the codebases were heavily modified, a
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The "problem" with digital artworks is that they can be copied indefinitely, so there's no way for the artist to artificially enhance their price by restricting supply. NFTs are something like a digital certificate of authenticity, saying that your copy is part of a limited edition and thus theoretically more valuable than a run of the mill digital copy. The hope is that by doing that, they can make digital artworks as expensive as tangible ones. If this seems like a bad idea to you, it's probably becaus
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You could make them useful though. For example, the artist sends a digital version of the work in two forms: the original graphics file (say PSD format) without a watermark applied and a more common image format like PNG with a watermark. The token's minted against the PSD file and the customer should only display the PNG file. The token then serves as proof of ownership, and the difficulty of removing the watermark without yielding an image with slight pixel-level differences protects against anyone copyin
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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Cookies are old-hat. Chocolate, now, is a whole 'nother matter.
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If the last few years have taught us anything, it's that our universe's author is a sadistic absurdist.
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Maybe the reason none of this makes sense to you is because you understand it just fine and it's a pile of BS. I remember feeling the same way about the Dot Com bubble. I didn't understand how any of those companies were supposed to make money and thought I must be missing something. Then a friend told me they were just stock scams, and the whole thing made perfect sense.
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They've figured out how to sell snake-oil without that messy business of having to raise and then press the snakes and bottle the oil. :)
Re:Forest from the trees (Score:4, Funny)
It's the "Greater Fool" theory in action, with real money.
I find it hilarious, frankly.
Some people will make money, but the rest of the suckers, errr, I mean "savvy investors" will be left with...what exactly? A dead link to an image on a site that no longer exists?
If there was an olympic event for stupidity (Score:3)
NFTs would win gold
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But it would really be just an NFT linking to a picture of a gold medal.
That headline makes me want to punch somebody (Score:1)
Two NFT Copycats Are Fighting Over Which is the Real Fake Bored Ape Yacht Club
WTF kinda genuine faux leather level of bullshit editing is that? Seriously? "Real Fake" is just maddeningly stupid.
Posted earlier, but it bears repeating (Score:5, Interesting)
When I was very little, someone purchased a star for me. Like, a real star... out somewhere in the galaxy.
I had a photo of the star framed on my wall, with hand written coordinates of the star's location, and a little blurb about how it belonged to me.
The company that sold this "to me" no longer exists. In fact, many companies were in this business, selling stars, keeping registration of who owned what stars.
There was no way of knowing if your star had already been sold to someone previously, no way to prevent it being sold again, and there was no way to physically claim your property. Virtually all of those companies are now defunct, and their ledgers are buried in the sands of time.
So, anyways, enjoy your NFTs.
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At least they had the sense of humor to list delivery as "customer pickup"
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1 star is $34.90 but a binary system is $69.90. People are getting ripped off on that 2 pack deal since you can buy 2 separate stars for $69.80 and it's not like binary systems are rare.
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Maybe it's like matched RAM kits, fewer compatibility issues knowing they came from the same batch.
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Lol, that is a great and apt analogy, I will reuse it. Thanks. Also, don't forget to check out the South Park Post Covid Return of Covid special.
VIC CHAOS. [youtube.com] So fucking good.
Re: Posted earlier, but it bears repeating (Score:1)
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I'm reminded of companies selling plots of land on the Moon and Mars. Unlike stars, which I think everyone knows are a joke, those guys were pitching their plots as valuable real-estate for the imminent future when people are living on those planets. Stake your claim early, they said.
NTFs are like that. Not a joke, they are being sold as investments. People honestly think that their bored ape will be worth hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of dollars.
Too many mental cases with money (Score:2)
This is what the 'art world' is filled with.
How else can you explain a literal pile of junk selling for millions, while beautiful modern paintings that sometimes take weeks to craft may only make the creator a few hundered dollars?
Re: Too many mental cases with money (Score:2)
Crypto is the tulip mania of the early 21st century.
This bubble will pop and the market will crash and burn just like the one centered around tulips centuries ago.
No proof of original ownership (Score:2)
NFT doesn't prove ownership of the copyright at all unless you bind the NFT to copyright office registration.
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Which you can't. So you can't. Which mean there isn't copyright on NFTs. Because you can't...
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You could probably set something up with an exclusive license transferable with the NFT. Fiddley, legally, but I imagine a proper copyright lawyer could write something that would stick.
Gotta love Satire. (Score:4, Insightful)
Showing how fucking ridiculous the whole concept is. Well played.
Unsecured NFTs will be copied (Score:2)
See title, if the NFT is available publicly without a watermark, there's nothing preventing people from copying the source material ad infinitum. And for simple .png or .gif artwork, NFT's may never be truly practical anyway.
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Gah remove the last apostrophe. Not sure how THAT got in there.
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Gah remove the last apostrophe. Not sure how THAT got in there.
That's so web 2.0 of you. You should be creating an NFT of "DrMrLordX's misplaced apostrophe", and marketing it.
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I think someone already beat me to it. I can't mint that NFT and have it be original.
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And if it is available publicly with a watermark, watermarks can be removed.
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I mean probably, but you get the idea. If you're have an insecure version of the file available to anyone who does not own the NFT, then you aren't very serious about making the work exclusive. Especially when you're dealing in a form of artwork for which copyright transfer via NFT apparently isn't settled law (yet).
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Owning data is contradictory to the nature of data: If anyone can see it, they can copy it. The only way you can really own data is to keep every copy of it secure, which means you can't then exhibit it to sell access. NFTs are just trying to force data to behave like physical objects, just like DRM does, and fail at the task for the same reason.
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Make sure they can't see it. That's the point.
Insane (Score:2)
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It's really not that much more insane than the conventional art market - price manipulation is common there as well.
South Park (Score:2)