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What happens if you upload copyright protected data in cleartext on a blockchain without having the distribution rights?

chinathrow 5y ago
You don't need to guess - someone is holding that copyright right now.
pjc50 5y ago
You can't really put content on the blockchain, that costs a surprising amount because of all the proof-of-waste. What happens is people put the content on a host and the URL on the blockchain. I suppose in theory it could be kept in IPFS, but few NFTs seem to bother with that.
- captn3m0 5y ago
  I’m tempted to upload a magnet URL dump to a cheap blockchain (there has to be one, right?)
  - tluyben2 5y ago
    Sure, just take a newly launched one. People are launching bollocks coins every day.
    - qorrect 5y ago
      bollocks coin* , yeah we should make that.
    - mpeg 5y ago
      There's multi-billion-dollar blockchains where transactions and storage cost a tiny fraction of what they do on Ethereum.
- SahAssar 5y ago
  Read the linked parent forum post. They are talking exactly about putting the actual images on the blockchain.
  - haasted 5y ago
    Well, they won't. All NFTs are hosted on hilariously centralized services like googleusercontent.com and similar. Browse through https://opensea.io/ https://opensea.io/, the most prominent NFT marketplace at the moment. Digging through the DOM of their website will reveal a lot of links to quite standard content storage solutions. They usually go through a bit of trouble to prevent people from simply clicking "view image in new tab" to reveal the actual location, but it's not difficult to get around.
    - tomerv 5y ago
      Did you actually read the post? They propose to put it on-chain, and even say > [O]ur NFT collection could very possibly become the largest on-chain collection ever in the history of Ethereum. Time would only be on our side because as gas becomes more expensive, the window of opportunity to bypass our on-chain NFT collection would fade away.
      - haasted 5y ago
        Remember that this is from the people that believe buying a book gives them the IP rights to the work (should have bought a Harry Potter book). They may not have thought it all the way through. To give an idea of the storage costs associated, I dug up this old stackexchange-answer about storage costs on Ethereum [0], which estimates that it costs about 76.000 USD / GB stored. Note that this is 5 year old answer, so the price will probably have multiplied like the price of ETH since then. Edit: Here's [1] a newer, updated price estimate that takes current prices into account : 309.9 Million / GB. LoL! [0] https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/872/what-is-the-cost-to-store-1kb-10kb-100kb-worth-of-data-into-the-ethereum-block/896#896 https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/872/what-is-the... [1] https://proderivatives.com/blog/2019/5/10/minimizing-data-storage-cost-on-the-ethereum-network https://proderivatives.com/blog/2019/5/10/minimizing-data-st...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- sneak 5y ago
  IPFS isn't hosting, it's transport. You can't "put something on ipfs" and expect it to stay there any more than when you "put something on http".
  - codetrotter 5y ago
    https://ipfs.io/ https://ipfs.io/ says: > Here's what happens when you add a file to IPFS — whether you're storing that file on your own local node or one operated by a pinning service or IPFS-enabled app. Notice that wording: “Add a file to IPFS”. It’s likewise fine to say, then, that you “put something on ipfs”.
  - donkeyd 5y ago
    That's odd, since the TP in HTTP stands for transfer protocol, but the FS in IPFS stands for file system. You'd expect to be able to store data on a file system. That's what I use my file system for anyway.
    - Workaccount2 5y ago
      A file system is simply a system for storing files. The filing cabinet is the storage, the way I organize files in the cabinet is the filing system.
  - mpeg 5y ago
    Most IPFS gateways allow you to pin content, plus they will automatically pin popular content to keep it available.
    - sneak 5y ago
      > plus they will automatically pin popular content to keep it available This is false. Popular content is cached temporarily. Pinning persists the data until unpinned; the ipfs daemon does not automatically pin anything.
- tluyben2 5y ago
  What blockchain? Some newer ones are not expensive (but also are not decentralized enough yet). They dismiss ipfs straight away in the responses already for it and actually say they will put the actual imagine on the blockchain. This will cost something (possibly a lot) depending on which chain, but they have $4m+ left to burn on ‘the good cause’. This all stinks but I must agree, if you want something for eternity (well, in their minds), putting the content on a big (btc/eth) chain would be the only way; seems the rest is far more brittle.
  - cma 5y ago
    Current eth prices are about 233M$/GB to get something on the chain. They could get about 17MB with all of their remaining funds.
    - tluyben2 5y ago
      Jikes, that's even worse than I thought. So then they will probably just go for another coin and store it there. Not sure how else. Or maybe they'll raise a few billion after this victory /s Unfortunately, things like that actually happen even though everyone here would consider it a joke.
- shock-value 5y ago
  A handful of words can be copyrightable. The idea of copyrighted content being stored on a blockchain that thousands of nodes duplicate and offer freely is an interesting conundrum that your reply entirely sidesteps. I’m guessing it has happened already but I too am interested in the legal implications of this.
  - pjc50 5y ago
    Legally it's not complicated: is it a copy? Is it permitted by the copyright owner? No? Then it's an infringing copy. Actually doing something about it is a problem, as shown throughout the post-Napster era, but every node that serves an infringing copy is potentially liable.
    - shock-value 5y ago
      A lot of nodes are run by some (relatively) well-known, well-funded companies. See https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/nodes-and-clients/nodes-as-a-service/ https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/nodes-and-clients/no... Wonder if they will be or have been subject to copyright complaints / lawsuits.
    - MereInterest 5y ago
      I'd add a number of additional complications. * Is the material copyrightable? A novel is copyrightable, but a recipe is not. The layout format of a telephone book is copyrightable, but the contents of it are not. * Is the copyright still in effect? Unfortunately, this is a less relevant question now, as anything written within living memory is under copyright, but it is still a required step. * Is permission from the copyright holder required? If I am sold a copy of a computer program, I'm allowed to make whatever copies are necessary (e.g. copying from the hard drive to RAM) that are necessary to execute the program, without the permission of the copyright holder. * What is being done with the copy? If I buy a work, the copyright owner has no right to prevent me from selling it, nor are they entitled to any portion of the proceeds. Re-sale of authorized copies, regardless of permission, are not infringements.
- qorrect 5y ago
  I naively always thought NFT's live on the actual block chain. That is the only thing that made them interesting to me.
- mpeg 5y ago
  The idea that people put the URL in the blockchain is misleading and people keep repeating it as a mantra. Yes, you put a URL on the blockchain but it's almost always a URL to the ipfs protocol e.g. ipfs://QmVc6zuAneKJzicnJpfrqCH9gSy6bz54JhcypfJYhGUFQu This identifier is a base58 encoding of a sha256 hash that points to the content. It doesn't actually tell you what host to use to find the content, that's completely left to the client app; so you could use an ipfs gateway like cloudflare-ipfs.com or ipfs.io or you could, imagining a future in which ipfs is not used anymore, use any other kind of p2p network to find the content. Just like gnutella, or torrents, as long as someone out there is hosting the content it's usually possible to find it.
  - neop1x 5y ago
    Except ipfs content disappears if no one is pinning it. And you can find IPs of hosts which are pinning it. Yes there is FileCoin but there are minimum and maximum file size and contract duration limits. So someone has to periodically check pins, contracts and keep purchasing new FileCoin contracts to keep it online.
    - mpeg 5y ago
      Yes, true, I don't think ipfs is meant to be censorship-resistant though, so finding the IP of hosts doesn't seem like a big deal for the project goals. My point was more that the NFT metadata itself could still be usable x years in the future when another protocol has replaced ipfs – it would just have to make the files findable by the existing hash. The biggest potential risk would be if sha256 becomes broken and finding collisions is trivial.
Freak_NL 5y ago
Bruce Schneier wrote about this on his blog about illegal content on Bitcoin's ledger: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2021/03/illegal-content-and-the-blockchain.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2021/03/illegal-conte... The answer seems to be that 'nothing much happens, yet'.

chinathrow 5y ago

You don't need to guess - someone is holding that copyright right now.

pjc50 5y ago

You can't really put content on the blockchain, that costs a surprising amount because of all the proof-of-waste. What happens is people put the content on a host and the URL on the blockchain. I suppose in theory it could be kept in IPFS, but few NFTs seem to bother with that.

captn3m0 5y ago
I’m tempted to upload a magnet URL dump to a cheap blockchain (there has to be one, right?)
- tluyben2 5y ago
  Sure, just take a newly launched one. People are launching bollocks coins every day.
  - qorrect 5y ago
    bollocks coin* , yeah we should make that.
  - mpeg 5y ago
    There's multi-billion-dollar blockchains where transactions and storage cost a tiny fraction of what they do on Ethereum.
SahAssar 5y ago
Read the linked parent forum post. They are talking exactly about putting the actual images on the blockchain.
- haasted 5y ago
  Well, they won't. All NFTs are hosted on hilariously centralized services like googleusercontent.com and similar. Browse through https://opensea.io/ https://opensea.io/, the most prominent NFT marketplace at the moment. Digging through the DOM of their website will reveal a lot of links to quite standard content storage solutions. They usually go through a bit of trouble to prevent people from simply clicking "view image in new tab" to reveal the actual location, but it's not difficult to get around.
  - tomerv 5y ago
    Did you actually read the post? They propose to put it on-chain, and even say > [O]ur NFT collection could very possibly become the largest on-chain collection ever in the history of Ethereum. Time would only be on our side because as gas becomes more expensive, the window of opportunity to bypass our on-chain NFT collection would fade away.
    - haasted 5y ago
      Remember that this is from the people that believe buying a book gives them the IP rights to the work (should have bought a Harry Potter book). They may not have thought it all the way through. To give an idea of the storage costs associated, I dug up this old stackexchange-answer about storage costs on Ethereum [0], which estimates that it costs about 76.000 USD / GB stored. Note that this is 5 year old answer, so the price will probably have multiplied like the price of ETH since then. Edit: Here's [1] a newer, updated price estimate that takes current prices into account : 309.9 Million / GB. LoL! [0] https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/872/what-is-the-cost-to-store-1kb-10kb-100kb-worth-of-data-into-the-ethereum-block/896#896 https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/872/what-is-the... [1] https://proderivatives.com/blog/2019/5/10/minimizing-data-storage-cost-on-the-ethereum-network https://proderivatives.com/blog/2019/5/10/minimizing-data-st...
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
sneak 5y ago
IPFS isn't hosting, it's transport. You can't "put something on ipfs" and expect it to stay there any more than when you "put something on http".
- codetrotter 5y ago
  https://ipfs.io/ https://ipfs.io/ says: > Here's what happens when you add a file to IPFS — whether you're storing that file on your own local node or one operated by a pinning service or IPFS-enabled app. Notice that wording: “Add a file to IPFS”. It’s likewise fine to say, then, that you “put something on ipfs”.
- donkeyd 5y ago
  That's odd, since the TP in HTTP stands for transfer protocol, but the FS in IPFS stands for file system. You'd expect to be able to store data on a file system. That's what I use my file system for anyway.
  - Workaccount2 5y ago
    A file system is simply a system for storing files. The filing cabinet is the storage, the way I organize files in the cabinet is the filing system.
- mpeg 5y ago
  Most IPFS gateways allow you to pin content, plus they will automatically pin popular content to keep it available.
  - sneak 5y ago
    > plus they will automatically pin popular content to keep it available This is false. Popular content is cached temporarily. Pinning persists the data until unpinned; the ipfs daemon does not automatically pin anything.
tluyben2 5y ago
What blockchain? Some newer ones are not expensive (but also are not decentralized enough yet). They dismiss ipfs straight away in the responses already for it and actually say they will put the actual imagine on the blockchain. This will cost something (possibly a lot) depending on which chain, but they have $4m+ left to burn on ‘the good cause’. This all stinks but I must agree, if you want something for eternity (well, in their minds), putting the content on a big (btc/eth) chain would be the only way; seems the rest is far more brittle.
- cma 5y ago
  Current eth prices are about 233M$/GB to get something on the chain. They could get about 17MB with all of their remaining funds.
  - tluyben2 5y ago
    Jikes, that's even worse than I thought. So then they will probably just go for another coin and store it there. Not sure how else. Or maybe they'll raise a few billion after this victory /s Unfortunately, things like that actually happen even though everyone here would consider it a joke.
shock-value 5y ago
A handful of words can be copyrightable. The idea of copyrighted content being stored on a blockchain that thousands of nodes duplicate and offer freely is an interesting conundrum that your reply entirely sidesteps. I’m guessing it has happened already but I too am interested in the legal implications of this.
- pjc50 5y ago
  Legally it's not complicated: is it a copy? Is it permitted by the copyright owner? No? Then it's an infringing copy. Actually doing something about it is a problem, as shown throughout the post-Napster era, but every node that serves an infringing copy is potentially liable.
  - shock-value 5y ago
    A lot of nodes are run by some (relatively) well-known, well-funded companies. See https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/nodes-and-clients/nodes-as-a-service/ https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/nodes-and-clients/no... Wonder if they will be or have been subject to copyright complaints / lawsuits.
  - MereInterest 5y ago
    I'd add a number of additional complications. * Is the material copyrightable? A novel is copyrightable, but a recipe is not. The layout format of a telephone book is copyrightable, but the contents of it are not. * Is the copyright still in effect? Unfortunately, this is a less relevant question now, as anything written within living memory is under copyright, but it is still a required step. * Is permission from the copyright holder required? If I am sold a copy of a computer program, I'm allowed to make whatever copies are necessary (e.g. copying from the hard drive to RAM) that are necessary to execute the program, without the permission of the copyright holder. * What is being done with the copy? If I buy a work, the copyright owner has no right to prevent me from selling it, nor are they entitled to any portion of the proceeds. Re-sale of authorized copies, regardless of permission, are not infringements.
qorrect 5y ago
I naively always thought NFT's live on the actual block chain. That is the only thing that made them interesting to me.
mpeg 5y ago
The idea that people put the URL in the blockchain is misleading and people keep repeating it as a mantra. Yes, you put a URL on the blockchain but it's almost always a URL to the ipfs protocol e.g. ipfs://QmVc6zuAneKJzicnJpfrqCH9gSy6bz54JhcypfJYhGUFQu This identifier is a base58 encoding of a sha256 hash that points to the content. It doesn't actually tell you what host to use to find the content, that's completely left to the client app; so you could use an ipfs gateway like cloudflare-ipfs.com or ipfs.io or you could, imagining a future in which ipfs is not used anymore, use any other kind of p2p network to find the content. Just like gnutella, or torrents, as long as someone out there is hosting the content it's usually possible to find it.
- neop1x 5y ago
  Except ipfs content disappears if no one is pinning it. And you can find IPs of hosts which are pinning it. Yes there is FileCoin but there are minimum and maximum file size and contract duration limits. So someone has to periodically check pins, contracts and keep purchasing new FileCoin contracts to keep it online.
  - mpeg 5y ago
    Yes, true, I don't think ipfs is meant to be censorship-resistant though, so finding the IP of hosts doesn't seem like a big deal for the project goals. My point was more that the NFT metadata itself could still be usable x years in the future when another protocol has replaced ipfs – it would just have to make the files findable by the existing hash. The biggest potential risk would be if sha256 becomes broken and finding collisions is trivial.

Freak_NL 5y ago

Bruce Schneier wrote about this on his blog about illegal content on Bitcoin's ledger: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2021/03/illegal-content-and-the-blockchain.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2021/03/illegal-conte... The answer seems to be that 'nothing much happens, yet'.