NFT’s and the doomed UltraViolet scheme
I‘ve already got lots of experience selling NFTs and the central problem then and now is that too much of the whole system is “somebody else’s problem.”
Now it Can Be Told: UltraViolet was an NFT scheme.
A long time ago (2010), when we were all pirating movies because buying them on disc seemed so…primitive, and there weren’t enough streaming options beyond Netflix, there was this idea that the movie industry had called UltraViolet. The studios wanted people to buy media playback rights, but people thought they were buying media files. Sound familiar?
The main problem they were trying to solve was keeping track of the “rights” that come with a “purchase” of a movie. Protip: unless it’s physical media, you’re not buying it, just licensing it and that license can be revoked. Read up on first sale doctrine if stuff like this is interesting to you.
UltraViolet was a massive effort doomed to fail because it was so convoluted and trying to maintain the old-world economic order for the studios, retailers, TV Companies and so on. Notably, Disney and Apple were not a part of it — but all of the other studios and tech companies were.
I was involved in a peripheral way trying to create a web site that could make sense of the astonishingly complex set of rules that were required to keep the studios and everyone else (but consumers) happy — you can read about that sad adventure here.
Here is an inaccurate diagram of how UltraViolet worked — I’ve highlighted the key concept — which was UltraViolet was sort of a centralized NFT model — with a company you never heard of (Neustar) running the “back office” of the whole thing at the time.
Note that the “media rights registry” is highlighted — this is because the media rights were legally protected in this system — the “rights” came with an enforcement capability. Also note that the gigantic orange blob was in the realm of a “somebody else’s problem” field — the universe’s most powerful method of ignoring a problem.
NFT’s and The “Somebody Else’s Problem” Problem.
The key thing that I think that matters today in the whole NFT mania is that it looks and feels the same as UltraViolet — we’ve just ripped out the centralized record with a (supposedly) decentralized record of rights purchases, leaving a massive amount of important stuff in the “somebody else’s problem” area.
Lacking even something as legally primitive as copyright, the NFT media right also suffers from a pseudo-decentralization and resulting challenges with interoperability. At the moment, this ends up with the ridiculous churn & burn of process of selling receipts rather than using NFT’s in a sensible fashion.
Now, I do think that NFT’s have a viable future — I’m not just an old man yelling at the cloud here — but at the moment, I’m sitting here agog watching all of these things and thinking just how close to NFT’s UltraViolet was and how it all might come back in a workable form now — without the studios and with the challenging parts worked out.
