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Hi everyone. And welcome back to Geek Time.欢迎回来【极客时间】。Hi, Brad.

Hello.

I know that I always ask you what we're gonna talk about, but can I propose a topic today?

Right, what do you have in mind?

NFT.

OK.

Something I see everywhere now, but I just don't understand. Would you say NFT is a big topic in English speaking world as well?

I would say it's really big, it's all over in the news these days. You see it just about anywhere, on Facebook, on YouTube, you'll see just tons and tons of videos and news stories about people buying NFTs.

But please tell me that people in English speaking world also don't understand, most of them…

Most of them really have no idea what it is, like a lot of them like the boomers are just like what is this NFT stuff.

Boomers are old. Ok, first things first, NFT in Chinese is called非同质化代币。同质就是同样的 I don't know, maybe同样的性质的代币it still sounds very technical, in English, it's…

Non-Fungible Token.

Fungible means…?

Not replaceable.

Not replaceable token, token is almost like a little coin, right, that you use; and they are art pieces, could you give us a, like a very general, description of what is a Non-Fungible Token?

Non-Fungible Tokens can really be any type of file format. They could be like jpeg art, they could be movie files, they could be music files, they could be 3D printable files, just about anything, but it ends kind of like involves just a bunch of data that you can sell.

But it's not replaceable because you have one file, and this file can only be used by like one person at a time.

Ok, so let me put it in an even simpler way, if you Brad were an artist, you made a digital creation, like a painting, digital painting. I wanna buy that painting, like I wanna buy the NFT of that painting, basically I buy something digital and then there's a file that shows I own the digital version of that painting or that digital painting.

Right, you would own like a license afore, right, so you wouldn’t own like the copyright to it.

Like original owner, the original creator of that, they would own the copyright to that idea, but like you could own depending upon like the base kind of, like the contractual agreement with the NFT, you could either just own it and have it for your own use or maybe even use it for like a license to be able to sell things containing that graphic or art.

所以就是原著者/原创者还是有著作权，还是有版权 copyright.

But I have, depending on how much I pay, depending on the contract, I will have some form of ownership either I can just have it to myself or I can use it for commercial use to make money.

Yeah.

And usually you said only one copy, but it's not just one copy, is it?

You can own one copy, you could own 10 copies of it, basically like the person who makes the art or whoever makes the NFT can make as many copies as they want, and so like the value of that can be really based on the number of copies, maybe there's only one copy of it or maybe…

And that is very, very expensive, if they're like millions of copies, then it's really cheap.

Exactly.

I see.

So say I pay you the money, I got the copy. What do I get? I don't just get the picture, I get a file?

It's a file, it's like a block chain file, so you get something that's like the art, but also it comes with like a block chain that shows like your ownership of it.

Block Chain就是区块链。

Another topic that we can really go into, but essentially I just get like a digital file that proves the ownership, ok.

You mentioned that a lot of NFT are basically just digital art, right, like jpeg or video or other digital art form. And I would assume nowadays a lot of artists they are using NFTs to sell a license for their art?

Yeah, like people on who make like videos on Youtube, bloggers, are making NFTs of some of their videos, or like some artists who do paintings or things like that are putting their art online for people to be able to buy an NFT version of it.

Ok, would you say that the emergence of NFT makes it easier or harder for artists to protect their copyright?

Definitely, because like it's much easier for someone to show who has ownership of something, if you create an NFT of something that goes a lot to show that you've either paid money to use this piece of art; the only thing that kind of makes it a kind of like a gray area is if I made a piece of art and then like uh, someone made a copy of that, they could make an NFT of my art and start selling it, so it is kind of like a little bit difficult.

And then when something like that maybe happens, then there's going to probably be some legal issues.

Because they violated your right first, but we're not getting into that, but you said yes, I bought it, I bought the NFT, I can own it or to myself or I can use it to make money, but can I change it?

Yeah, you can, like some of them are generative art pieces.

Generative就是生成艺术。Basically, I can use digital technology like softwares to change the color of it, to change the shape of it.

And some artists will even make like pieces of art that you can buy multiple pieces of, and combine them to make like your own art with those combinations as well.

That's pretty cool, so I can buy a few NFTs and smashed them together, like madly.

Yeah.

But it's not just the art world, right, gaming world also has found uses of NFTs.

NFTs can be used like in games to show that you own certain items within the game, and then you can buy and sell these items, they can also be used to buy a land within the game.

And so like if you have like a MMORPG, there are some that are quite old that have used this concept, some games you don't really ever get to buy land, they're just the land is either…

Owned by the game.

Owned by the game, or like you have a like when you go into a specific doorway, you go into your room like it's not really a place where you can really do much, you can maybe put a chair somewhere or something, it's just kind of like a bland room, but that room is your room, once you leave, you go out into the real world again, but like everyone has their own room once they go through that door. However, in some games, they'll actually have like a place within the game where everyone can go, but this is your property and like maybe you can own this land and do whatever you want with that land.

Yeah, I think I'm not a big gamer, but I grew up playing some games and I also played MMORPG 这种多人在线的这种角色扮演类的游戏，I used to be quite into that.

So you can now basically sell virtual land, 就可以虚拟的进行那种游戏里面的场景和土地，包括各种各样道具的买卖。

I've heard that people made actually quite a lot of money in selling virtual properties.

Yeah, one of the biggest pieces of property was something that would be equivalent to what would be like 16 acres of land in the real world sold for $1 million, it was just under US$1 million.

But it's not real, it's in the game.

Just in the game.

$1 million to buy the digital land, WOW.

And I've seen things that have gone like into the millions of dollars, I've never seen anything like tens of millions, but that's for like an in game like piece of land. That was probably one of the biggest things I've seen.

Who has that money to spend on virtual land?

Not me unfortunately.

Okay, and also we talked about games, what about films and music? I know for a fact that some musicians are selling their singles or even their albums.

When it comes to really famous musicians, this isn't… I haven't really heard much about that yet, there have been like a few musicians who have like a singular album that they might sell to like in one individual for a very large amount of money, and usually that comes with like they have a license to listen to the music, but they're not allowed to sell the music or something like that.

I see, so it's kind of…let me put it in a simpler way, if, again, I’m using you Brad as an example, if you were a rockstar and I am your number one fan, you released a single; and now I wanna just have that single all to myself, I can technically say to you, do you want to sell it as an NFT so I will own that and that's the only copy in the world.

Yeah, you could do that, or they might do something where they only sell like 100 copies of the song.

But then I wouldn't pay as much.

Definitely not, it's like the value is based on how much you sell, but yeah, when it comes to some artists, they have like a director Quentin Tarantino, he's gotten a little bit of trouble recently because he started selling uncut versions of scenes for movies that he's made as NFTs.

Why did he get into trouble for that?

Because that was something that when it comes to movies, he is not the sole owner of the movie

Of course.

He is like, the movie studio, right, he was the writer, director of these films, but the movie studio actually owns like a portion of that.

And I think he was thinking that he could do what he wanted because these were like uncut scenes that weren't actually in the movie, and so they were kind of… but that's part of what the movie studios paid for, they have uncut scenes that they can put into later editions of the film.

So it's not really a NFT issues, it’s more still a copyright dispute.

And that's why like you're selling a license to something, but that license isn't like his necessarily to sell.

I see, it's still I mean so many legal issues in this because like you said, it's ultimately about copyright and have you ever heard of a celebrity, I forgot in which country actually sold like a 3D printing, let's say file, of her own body.

Yeah.

You can technically buy all these measurements and digital files of different parts of her exact body, and I guess then you can print them out for whatever.

It's quite interesting because when you 3D print, there's different types of materials, you definitely wouldn't want to use like the hard plastics, but they have like printable rubbers and things like that you can use, so kind of interesting.

Basically you are owning exact same size, life size like you know xx doll.

Yeah.

Ok, sorry children.

So many memes…

I know, okay, on that note, we're gonna wrap up here. I don't know if your brains are as scrambled as mine’s are. We're gonna continue in the advanced episode, don't know what advanced episode is about. We're gonna continue to talk about NFT. And meanwhile share with us in the comment section, what you think about NFT, would you ever want to pay for NFT.

And see if you could make some money.

Exactly, we'll see you in the next episode. Bye.

Bye, everyone.