• 14 Posts
  • 720 Comments
Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: December 18th, 2023

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  • Does anyone know why nfts are so small?

    Because storage space on “The Blockchain” is very expensive.

    The blockchain is a complete list of all transaction made with a cryptocurrency. You have heard of miners. What they do is collect transactions and append them to the blockchain. Every miner must have a complete copy of the whole chain. So whenever a new NFT is created, lots of copies have to be stored and kept forever. It’s just not a good solution from an engineering standpoint. But for the popular currencies, that’s the smaller problem.

    Every miner wants a fee for their services. That fee depends on the value of the cryptocurrency. There is no relation to the actual storage cost.

    Besides, crypto does not offer any kind of DRM. If it did, the copyright industry would be all over it. Anyone can download anything on the blockchain.

    The reason you can’t resell games is, because the publishers don’t allow it. For example, Steam has a marketplace. It would be no technical problem to make games transferrable between users. The rights-owners don’t want that.




  • If the same user can generate the same input, it will result in the same hash.

    Yes, if. I don’t know if you can guarantee that. It’s all fun and games as long as you’re doing English. In other languages, you get characters that can be encoded in more than 1 way. User at home has a localized keyboard with a dedicated key for such a character. User travels across the border and has a different language keyboard and uses a different way to create the character. Euro problems.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_equivalence

    Byte length of the character is irrelevant as long as you’re not doing something ridiculous like intentionally parsing your input in binary and blithely assuming that every character must be 8 bits in length.

    There is always some son-of-a-bitch who doesn’t get the word.

    • John F. Kennedy



  • can exercising one’s agency over their body really be considered “rent-seeking”?

    First of all, I am not impressed by this kind of emotional manipulation. You are talking about exercising agency, power, over other people’s bodies. If someone, whether a VFX artist or a hobbyist, would use a likeness without a license, you want them stopped. At the end of the day that means that LEOs will use physical force. You may not think of something like copyright being enforced through physical force, but that is what happens if someone steadfastly refuses to pay fines or damages.

    Enforcing intellectual property, like a likeness right, means ultimately exercising power over other people’s bodies. The body whose likeness it is, may not be involved at all. In the typical case of a Hollywood star, they would be completely unaware of what the enforcers are doing.

    Rent-seeking is an economics term. Rent-seeking is as rent-seeking does. You may feel that society - the common people -have to suffer for “justice”, like people were expected to suffer for the diving rights of kings. But you can’t expect people not to remark the negative consequences. Well, I guess if I were living in such a monarchy, subject to the divine right of a king, I would be quite circumspect. I wouldn’t want to be tortured or imprisoned, after all. And yet it moves.

    Usually, rent-seeking involves property, and yet the right to own property is internationally recognized as a human right.

    to alienate workers from their labor and exploit them.

    We’re probably not on the same page regarding terminology. This sounds like a Karl Marx idea. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx’s_theory_of_alienation

    Obviously that’s not what you mean. I guess I’m just surprised to see these hints of leftism mixed in with conservative economics.

    SAG-AFTRA

    …is fundamentally a conservative organization. It’s no coincidence that Ronald Reagan was president of SAG, before becoming president of the US. They will favor the in-group over the out-group and the top over everyone at the bottom. That’s what the doctrines you are repeating are designed for.



  • I have the distinct impression that a number of people would object to the purpose of re-hosting their content as part of a commercial service, especially one run by Google.

    Anyway, now no one has to worry about Google helping people bypass their robots.txt or IP-blocks or whatever counter-measures they take. And Google doesn’t have to worry about being sued. Next stop: The Wayback Machine.


  • Are you really conflating people who make their living based upon their acting skills and likeness with landlords?

    No. I am talking about rent-seeking.

    Rent-seeking is the act of growing one’s existing wealth by manipulating the social or political environment without creating new wealth.[1] Rent-seeking activities have negative effects on the rest of society. They result in reduced economic efficiency through misallocation of resources, stifled competition, reduced wealth creation, lost government revenue, heightened income inequality,[2][3] risk of growing corruption and cronyism, decreased public trust in institutions, and potential national decline.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking

    You could argue to what a degree landlords or Elon Musk are engaged in rent-seeking. Likeness rights are a clear example, though.

    Imagine in the near future. Some famous person licenses their likeness for a show, game, movie. Maybe the producer hires an unknown actor that is then digitally altered into the famous person, like a more advanced version of Gollum. Or maybe the VFX artists can do it on their own. These guys work. The famous person does nothing. They might be dead, while the rights-owners still collect license fees.


  • Knowing people who are not famous but are SAG-AFTRA actors, I’m going to have to disagree very much on that.

    How do likeness rights benefit non-famous people?

    Turning likeness into an intellectual property implies the right to sell it. Apparently you want to argue for likeness, so I don’t see why you would use such clauses as an argument.

    That’s a poor and fallacious argument there.

    It’s not an argument, as you have recognized. I hoped it would make you think.

    You know that not everyone in Hollywood is part of SAG-AFTRA, right? Have you ever wondered what happened to them during the strike? I guess they just have to fend for themselves. If the “union” doesn’t care about those guys, do you think the leadership cares about the small members?

    Actors are a conservative lot. At the bottom, you have the “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” and at the top… Well, you know. It’s not common on lemmy to cheer for such a system.