Gonna be honest - I don't really understand any of this.<p>IIRC the discussion the other day, where someone shared the terms, it stated they're buying the NFT not the copyright/rights to the video.<p>So what does deleting it actually mean? The NFT owner can't do anything with it other than say "I own the NFT" (they can't monetise it), and assuming there's going to be some kind of <i>policing</i> around the deletion, it's just going to be whack a mole on YouTube/WhateverTube with uploaders and people that still want to watch a cute video from 2007 (and don't care about NFTs or it being the 'actual, real, original' upload).<p>Strange times.
The creator of a thing can decide to remove their copy of it and not license it further.<p>Someone else can pay for a token that signifies... something. At the very least, that they've purchased a token. I'm not sure what more.<p>Although unlike the author I'm okay with only the people who were so into a "cute baby" level video that they downloaded it for retaining a copy. Popular media getting forgotten in the churn of history is rather normal and it's worked out okay so far.
YouTube already cannot delete the video. As mentioned in the article, Bin Laden had a copy of it on his hdd. How many other drives have a copy? Unlike the Mona Lisa postcards, these copies are just as good as the origin and I disagree that the YouTube URL is somehow important to the video's preservation.<p>Admittedly, the copyright situation is a bit less clear though. Presumably the video will become public domain at some point, at which time the Internet Archive can offer it as they already do for other out of copyright video.
The main thing I learned from (a link in) this article is that Bin Laden had Charlie Bit My Finger in his personal collection?!<p><a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-41840864" rel="nofollow">https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-41840864</a><p>> The al-Qaeda leader had a series of animated films on his hard drive including Antz, Cars, Chicken Little and The Three Musketeers.
There were also several YouTube videos, including a viral clip from the UK called "Charlie bit my finger" and videos about crocheting, including one entitled "How to crochet a flower". The role-playing computer game Final Fantasy VII was also on the computer.<p>FF VII is actually a really good choice if you’re stuck inside for months or years on end. I’m baffled as to how OBL came to understand that, though.
I have a revolutionary idea. Instead of writing Quote Unquote Great Works, we could use a symbol to denote the Quote (opening) and Unquote (closing) around the word or sentence, like $Great Works$. We could even use the quote symbol (") for this purpose, which is kind of neat.<p>It would look like this: "Great Works".<p>It's so crazy it might just work.<p>(but seriously, WTF, article?)
Did the family sell an NFT of the digital representation only, or the representation AND the copyright?<p>Furthermore, there are numerous problems with digital archival that need to be addressed.<p>Some pages have complicated backend dependencies (APIs, tokens, dynamic content) that make naive mirroring effectively useless for preservation. Example would be some of the old versions of patches and KB articles from the Microsoft Windows support site when it wasn't as simple as visiting a plain webpage but redirection to dynamic content. Downloads often required an extra redirection to a mirror or some sort of analytics check-in to get a concrete (one-time token authorized too?) link.<p>Does digital archival require a right to be forgotten?<p>Media players, converters, and complete documentation about formats need to be preserved in order for media to be useful indefinitely.<p>How about describing the encoding of plain text documents so that that's preserved too?<p>Capturing as much metadata as reasonably possible so that it can be useful for future users and researchers.
In the future, it'll be exclusive to the CBMF Streaming Network ($7.99/month).<p>I'm grateful that music didn't end up fragmented into a multitude of walled gardens like video. You can listen to almost all popular music with 2 popular flat-rate services. It could have turned out much, much worse.<p>Podcasts are the current battleground. I can't predict how that will turn out.
Can't wait for Gruber to start NFTing each of his Daring Fireball blog posts. He's done extremely well selling a single tasteful banner ad for, last I checked, $6,000/week on his site. Blog posts by popular authors are actually a decent fit because they're like cryptographically sponsoring something--at least you'd get exposure for the money you spent.
Lots of people here saying they don't see the point of NFTs. I totally agree for digital artefacts like this video. After all, the original can be copied perfectly as many times as necessary.<p>Wouldn't they actually be more useful for (say) ownership deeds of a property, or car or something?
Fascinating. After it’s deleted from YouTube, I wonder what searches for the video will show, and how long before we converge on some new copy as being the canonical link.
Not everything needs to be "saved". We have tons of articles already about this short video and the parents have the right to delete it if they want. The same way I have the right to delete content I own.
NFTs, Crypto (or what Crypto has become), and a few other current Internet phenomena give me an overwhelming sense of rot.<p>Everything is rotting. I'm not sure if it's too much capital, capital on the wrong places, capital and not enough oversight, or whatever, but the Internet as we knew it will be dead and gone without sincere effort. In its place will be a paved over, child safe playground optimized for ad delivery, emotional reactions, and propaganda.