Tuesday, February 8th, 2022
Finally the first (academic) paper / essay trying to say in many (read between the lines) words the obvious - yes, the Lavra Labs Bros - Matt Hall and John Watkinson - are con-art crypto bro fraudsters if the continue pushing the false narrative (“or is that self-enriching lies”) with claiming copyright for trivial 24x24px (profile) images in 8-bit colors.
Note: There might be a case for “protecting” the complete collection but individual attributes (a smile, for example, is a single black pixel in a 24x24 matrix, the clown nose, is four red pixels, the mouth is three black pixels, and so on) or punks, that is, let’s face it - ridiculous.
Remember - the Larva Labs Bros - Matt Hall and John Watkinson
Anyways, the Are CryptoPunks Copyrightable? paper abstract reads:
Larva Labs’s CryptoPunks [non-fungible] token are iconic. Created in 2017, they were among the first [non-fungible] tokens on the Ethereum blockchain. Four years later, they are among the most valuable, selling for anywhere from $200,000 to millions of dollars.
The CryptoPunks collection consists of 10,000 [non-fungible] tokens, each of which is associated with a unique CryptoPunks image. Everyone knows who owns each CryptoPunks [non-fungible] token. The Ethereum blockchain provides indelible proof. But people disagree about who owns - and who should own - the copyright in the CryptoPunks images. Most CryptoPunks [non-fungible] token owners believe they should own the copyright in the image associated with their [non-fungible] token, or at least have the right to use it. Larva Labs believes it owns the copyright in all of the images, and entered a licensing deal with United Talent Agency based on its ownership of the CryptoPunks brand and copyrights.
Color me skeptical. I’m not sure anyone owns the copyright in the CryptoPunks images, because I’m not sure they’re copyrightable in the first place. And I suspect Larva Labs is also worried about the copyrightability of the CryptoPunks images. After all, they complain about copyright infringement, but don’t file infringement actions.
In this essay, I explain how copyright works, what it protects, and why. I analyze the copyrightability of the CryptoPunks images. And I reflect on what it means for the CryptoPhunks and V1 Punks [non-fungible] tokens, as well as the [non-fungible] token market in general.
And the paper / essay concludes:
Does any of this matter? I just explained to you why the CryptoPunks images might not be protected by copyright. But I’m confident my analysis will have no impact on the market for CryptoPunks [non-fungible] tokens. Why not? Maybe because copyright doesn’t really matter. Or rather, maybe because the whole point of [non-fungible] tokens is to make copyright irrelevant. Larva Labs is obviously worried about its copyright in the CryptoPunks images. Maybe it should stop worrying and learn to love open-access and the public domain.
What’s your take?
The founder of “Unauthorized Authentics” posts some corrections to the “Are CryptoPunks Copyrightable?” paper on the finer points of the con-art fraud:
Neither of these statements is true. Cryptopunks was created before the [ethereum blockchain] metadata standards existed. There’s no [internet address] URL [in the contract]. There isn’t anything pointing anywhere per se. Similarly there’s no actual link between the on-chain [cryptopunks] data contract [with the public bitmap pixels and meta data] and the cryptopunks contract [V1 or V2].
Brian L. Frye: Thx! These are the hard parts to get right. How would you describe it?
The gist is the connection between the record of “ownership” (the function mapping a token id to an ethereum address) and the images is even more tenuous than you suggest. Purely socially mediated. Nothing in the contract that implies a connection between the two.
As to the on-chain [cryptopunk] data contract, it’s basically a [public] server [ / service] by another name. Again nothing in the cryptopunk contracts that points to them, the interface you’re using has to know to look it up there. The on-chain [cryptopunk] data contract does not conform to any metadata standard either.
But I think there’s a key difference between hosting the images on a server, and building them on-chain in a [public] contract (as the data contract does). A key feature of ethereum is permissionless composability.
They [the Larva Labs Bros - Matt Hall and John Watkinson -] could have written the contracts to disallow being called by other contracts, but they didn’t. So my question is: Does that constitute an implied license? If not, how does that effect every other type of contract on the network? Think it would pose a big issue for defi [decentralized finance services], etc.
[Note: ] The use of the term “encrypted” is not correct, if it were encrypted it would need to be decrypted to be read. All the data in question is public and unencrypted.
Post them on the CryptoPunksDev reddit. Thanks.