If you are lucky, you can buy a portrait of a robot for $600 in the online auction market OpenSea.
The Voguverse is an elaborate 37th-century mythos involving space arcsologies, a nuclear war, and interstellar travel. The portrait is one of many digital assets being sold as NFTs. The creators of the fictional universe think they can use a new way to tell stories.
Entrepreneurs are imagining a media industry built around NFTs. The vision is sometimes dubbed a "decentralized Disney", a world of fictional characters and creative properties that are owned by fans, not a single company. Many NFT enthusiasts are buying in talent agencies.
What does it mean to own? Many are still figuring that out.
:noupscale is a file on thechorusasset.com.
Over the past couple of years, NFTs have exploded into a lucrative and growing market. Some of the most sought-after NFTs are collectibles. The most popular token can sell for millions of dollars in sales that are more like art auctions than a trade.
NFTs have made the biggest waves in the fine art world, and some NFT collectibles series are united by an aesthetic rather than a narrative. A set of 10,000 mostly human pixelated portraits are known as the CryptoPunks. Many are based on fiction. The city might look like Arctopolis, where the Chill City NFT penguins live and work. It might involve something like the Voguverse.
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The home of the penguins is depicted in the art.
The city is called Chill City.
The Voguverse lore explains the history of the Tars, a name that stands for "Tether assisted robotic skeleton." Humans live in space-bound "hives" ruled by a galactic government and mega-corporations that deal in cryptocurrencies in the future. A lot of NFT lore involves fans getting rich. People use telepresence bots to revisit their home planet, buying models that reflect their personality and jobs.
Vogu founder Andrew Trackzy thinks that the next big media intellectual property could be the TARS. Vogu's goal is to become a large-scale worldwide intellectual property like Star Wars or Pokémon. Vogu doesn't hit the bar, but he thinks another project will. I believe that someone in the NFT space will create the next big worldwide intellectual property.
He is not alone. Stoner Cats, a collectible that is funding an animated series featuring Mila Kunis andSeth MacFarlane, is one of the NFT series that involve formal media tie-ins. The Bored Ape Yacht Club is represented by U2 and Madonna's manager, Guy Oseary, as well as the creator of CryptoPunks, who signed to a Hollywood talent agency in August. Trackzy says Vogu is working on a webtoon set in the Voguverse.
Trackzy has a plan to build media franchises from toy lines like GI Joe and Transformers. NFTs are harder for kids to play with than action figures. Many buyers are looking for a fast-growing investment rather than an art piece or a toy.
Lion-O didn't have the screen time in the last episode that I needed, so most people aren't calling up.
Trackzy says that with an action figure, most people don't call up thecats and Lion-O didn't have the screen time in the last episode that I needed. As a project, you are constantly under pressure from your community to increase the value of that collectible.
Buyers can forge a connection with a genuine one-of-a-kind character because of the unique nature of each NFTavatar. Some NFT buyers make fan art of their purchases, while others spin entire independent stories around them, like the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT. The entire lineup can be raised if one of these stories blows up. The person who made the NFT can collect a royalty every time a collectible is sold, unlike an action figure.
Drew Austin is an investor who is working on a community NFT narrative project. Austin says that they are putting the foundation in place so that people can use their imagination and create stories and content and experiences with their own characters that they own through this. The ability to leverage the community, to be able to expand on intellectual property and to create a universe is a really exciting concept.
The dream might sound intuitive in the world of modern media franchises, where giant games and blockbuster movies are shaped by convoluted licensing deals for beloved figures like Spider-Man. Fans could collaborate to have their favorite characters share the same fictional world instead of rooting for a giant corporate merger.
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For believers, NFTs and entertainment intellectual property rights seem like a perfect match, with an emerging market with a billion-dollar industry in dire need of disruption.
The two forms of ownership don't neatly overlap, and owning a fictional character and an NFT are very different things. It is an important distinction that is still being grappled with in the NFT world.
We need to dig into how NFTs and intellectual property work. NFTs are entries on a database called a blockchain. These entries represent a file or physical object, and an entry is linked with a specific wallet. You control a digital wallet and owning an NFT means having its entry associated with it.
NFTs do not give any specific, universal set of legal rights.
The difference is that owning a media property means that you own the intellectual property associated with it. At an incredibly simplified level, a copyright is an exclusive, automatically granted legal right to sell copies of a creative work or produce other media based on it. The US Patent and Trademark Office can help you register a trademark for your name or mark.
NFTs do not give a specific set of legal rights. Part of their appeal is supposed to be that you don't need a government to enforce their ownership. Intellectual property is enforced by individual countries and international bodies.
Disney sells a new lineup of NFT collectibles that are basically trading cards and don't have rights to the underlying art. Some NFT sellers try to outline an intellectual property framework. The terms of service are drawn up and laid out. Both parties have agreed to this contract if you own the NFT. If one side breaks it, the other side could go to court to recover their money.
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The Voguverse robot NFTs are part of a fictional universe.
Vogu Collective
The contracts vary a lot. You can use the Chill City penguin NFT to make one-off units of T-shirts or other items depicting the penguin. You can only use the phrase "Bored Ape" to refer to the NFT number if you want to sell merchandise or derivative works depicting your ape. The NFT License is an attempt at a standardized intellectual property framework. Cool Cats says users are free to do anything with their cats.
Even a fairly generous NFT deal isn't the same as Disney owning the Avengers. Vogu gives the owners of the TARS a license to use an image of a robot with specific features. If Vogu wants to depict that robot in its media, it needs to either get their permission or buy it back from them. The company spent $16,000 on a besuited robot to be used as a CEO.
Buying the NFT doesn't give you any intellectual property rights to the underlying details of the Voguverse. If you wanted to make a cartoon starring your TARS without Vogu's approval, you would have to invent a whole new sci-fi world complete with new names for everything.
It served as inspiration to us when we looked at a CryptoPunk.
NFT creators can design a non-minted media character in the style of their collectibles. Vogu could have made a nearly identical robot, but added an accessory, if it wanted to avoid paying for a CEO that looked like a specific TARS. Major characters won't be drawn from the TARS NFT lineup, but the Vogu Collective plans to hold virtual casting calls for cameo roles. Stoner Cats isn't selling NFTs of its main characters, for example, it's offering collectibles recomming their attributes.
We wanted artists to be able to use what they purchase in the space. Trackzy says that is part of the value of owning assets. It is a business decision that we had to make, to make sure that the community was happy with the rights that we gave them. We have to make sure that Universal Studios is comfortable with the idea of making a movie.
Many NFT sellers still want people to play. Disney is notorious for cracking down on copyrighted works, but plenty of them welcome fan works. A lot of collaborations involve handshake approval or one-off licensing deals, not an automaticBlockchain contract, and that is not unusual for small creative projects of any stripe.
The team behind the project says they have been working with BAYC since the beginning. The teams are working together to make sure that everyone is protected, and we will continue to exercise due care to make sure that their intellectual property is expressed in a positive way that does not contradict what they are building, they wrote in an email. They will not be using the Bored Ape branding in their work.
We wanted artists to be able to use what they purchase in the space. That is part of the value of the assets.
The Vogu Collective grants licenses on a case-by-case basis to people who don't own the NFT. A Voguverse fan is currently building a Voguverse-themed game based on the freely available D&D ruleset, thanks to an informal agreement that gives Vogu final approval rights.
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The cover of a comic book.
There is a vault called the Pixel Vault.
Some people are making art without this kind of top-down approval, but they are careful about ownership issues. The Punks comic is based on portraits from the CryptoPunks lineup. Sean Gearin says that they haven't been able to contact Larva Labs for approval because they don't own the avatars. The company enlisted three teams of lawyers to create a unique intellectual property.
A tiny and unnamed figure with a cigarette and a hat is a Punk of the band. Beanie has the same hat and cigarette, but he has a more detailed comic-book style, and he is a former busboy who became a digital art mogul. When you look at the comic itself, it bears no resemblance to the original art of Larva Labs.
The process of filing off the serial numbers is similar to the one used by Pixel Vault. In traditional comics, such as Doom Patrol's Willoughby Kipling, and Marvel's Wade Wilson, it was created as a stand-in for a character.
NFTs are important in this area. PunkPuns would probably draw community censure and pressure from Larva Labs if it wasn't drawing inspiration from the individual Cryptoks. The fact that you don't need a license to get inspired by a work of art isn't changing because of the blockchain.
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Punks is only the beginning of the story for the vault, which is trying its own ambitious approach to NFT stories. The Metahero Universe is a franchise built by a core creative team but run by fans.
Metahero started with a series of generative NFT avatars. A series of comic books and a big-budget game are what the company wants. To manage this, it has founded a series of planet-themed DAOs.
Similar to shareholders at a company, groups of token holders pool their resources and vote on decisions. This system allows for broad decision-making rather than ownership of a specific character. It could make the process of designing a video game more difficult.
It could be difficult to build a Metahero game. When I spoke to the staff at the company, most of them were not in game design. It is considering partnering with a larger studio. NFT holders are supposed to pick the game's genre and then vote on numerous decisions throughout development to the point of firing an entire creative team. It is an intriguing experiment, but it also sounds like a campaign for a piece of video game concept art and promises to let backers run the studio.
I think self-preservation will rule the day.
If a game is open to non-DAO members, the structure also encourages a fandom. If more money offers visual flair or special abilities, players without an expensive NFT could join and have fun. In theory, the developer could be ordered to steamroll every other player in the game.
DAO members are invested in the long-term health of the game, so they will avoid this. Self-preservation will rule the day. He says that the idea of being able to pay to win will stunt the growth of the game. The community can decide what they will do. At the end of the day, people act in their own best interests.
45 percent of the voting power in any decision is controlled by the escape hatch of the Pixel Vault. The planetary DAOs control 45 percent of the total, and 10 percent is tied up in a founder DAO that is not associated with the project. It is similar to the little security that helps ensure that the best decision is made. In theory, all the DAOs could unite against their creator and take the universe in any direction they wanted.
While Metahero is an attempt to create a media franchise, some NFT creators are encouraging NFT owners to build a fan-made world around it.
The best example of this is Loot. The contents of the loot bags are procedurally generated lists with a fantasy flavor.
The text-based loot bags have inspired a dedicated fandom. Buyers created art depicting their bag's contents and formed guilds with people who own the same item, while other creators designed independent NFTs that pair with the bags. If you own a loot bag, you can do things like create a custom character, or hold items from the bag. The bag is linked with the loot character.
It starts to feel like you are engaging with a corporation when you make it formal.
A member of the Loot Character team, who goes by Moniker, says the group talks with the core Loot team. The whole enterprise is informal. There is no hard answer as to who holds the rights to Loot Characters' art or even the name of the project. Moniker says it is a bit of a handshake. It starts to feel like you are engaging with a corporation when you make it formal.
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A procedurally generated character.
The character was loot.
Adventure Cards is a project that uses Loot's formula to create a Magic: The Gathering-style game. The community-built augmentations have been inspired by Adventure Cards. The creator of Adventure Cards says he wants people to feel like they can own the cards and be inspired by them, as long as everyone is explicit about what their contribution is. I would like to let people do as much as possible.
NFT creators have a commitment to openness, but not a formal system for sharing ownership of the world. It is not yet known what the best ways of leading the communities are. There is a chance that a DAO is composed of people who contributed to the Adventure Cards universe. If a company wanted to adapt a series for film or TV, they would work with the DAO to sign a deal, and the profits would be split between the members.
It is not yet known what the best ways of leading the communities are.
That is a different model than some older web art. A lot of authors write reports about imaginary incidents in the SCP Foundation. The entries are licensed under the Creative Commons model, which allows anyone to modify or build on a work. The Creative Commons system requires that all the original stories and any adaptation must be free, and the wiki warns that they won't be getting rich. That guaranteed legal safety has turned into a larger media universe than any other project. It is the source material for spinoff novels, video games, and short films.
The latest attempt to monetize fan labor is just the latest example of NFT projects' murky ownership questions. In late October, six young adult fiction authors sparked a community backlash with a project called Realms of Ruin: a fantasy world where the authors would compose origin stories and fans would write tie-ins that they could mint as NFTs. Potential participants were concerned that they would be giving up legal ownership of their property in exchange for a token, and that the copyright to the tie-in stories would not be clear. The project was shut down within hours after the negative response.
It is not clear if NFTs make it easier to craft new art from old art or if they would help settle common copyright conflicts. Fair use is a situation where proving ownership is not the point. Disney's long feud with comic book writers is dependent on the precise terms of a contract. If the rightsholder can't be found, a blockchain could help prevent works from beingphaned or dropped into a limbo where the rightsholder can't be found.
Attempting to use NFTs as a proxy for copyright raises its own concerns. If you sell a comic book about a superhero, write a book about the hero, and then buy a superhero character, there is no clear rule as to whether the new buyer should get the rights to the comic. It is not clear how many people would need to sign a deal for a TV series about that comic.
NFT owners might love their digital characters, but companies still own the names and stories that give them meaning. Is Main Street going to be hit by these individually owned NFTs? You are just a cool picture of a monkey if you can't use the Bored Ape Yacht Club name. Trackzy says that if you can't use the Vogu name, you are just a cool picture of a robot. I think we have a long way to go.
