> but over time this is very ugly and frustrating (as it requires manual intervention) and you block the disposable Email provider they used ...
This seems like an ego issue honestly. Like you feel like you are being taken advantage of. If only a very small numbers of users are doing this then I don't see it worth the dev time to block the email providers they use possibly hurting valid customers. Just leave it alone. I use Relay for services I genuinely pay for but don't want to give out my email address in case of leaks.
I don't want to talk about vaccines anymore. Whatever study people have to cherry pick or whatever beliefs you may hold, whatever your stance is, most people have made the decision on whether or not to be vaccinated.
What I wish we focused on instead, is the medical system as a whole. We've been hearing stories everyday about how hospitals are on the brink of collapse. Why, in 2 years of this pandemic, have we not devoted the resources to expanding bed capacity and staffing hospitals? Why is testing still so unsustainable? From day 1 of the pandemic, from social distancing, to masking, to now getting vaccinated, the messaging has been do all of these things to avoid overwhelming the hospitals so it seems weird to me that 2 years later the messaging is exactly the same.
My wife is trying to become a nurse. Thanks to COVID screwing up her school schedule she's at least a year behind.
She's currently working as a residential assistant at rather nice elderly care facility where they are short staffed. She makes about what she would make at a fast food restaurant despite working in a semi-skilled position(requires CNA credentials) and working with COVID positive residents. They are just now discussing possible pay raises.
The pandemic experience is likely to push people out of health care and result in even less people choosing it as a career unless compensation and the workload changes. This comes just as the baby boomers are reaching an age when they'll start to need serious care.
idk it seems like the healthcare industry as a whole made bank off this whole thing, if they want to help prove it wasn't largely a massive cash grab for the people at the top, then surely they'll reinvest their profits back into salaries to solve understaffing issues?
Elderly care isn’t really the same as the health care industry. I don’t know the nuances well so I might be wrong about this.
Meanwhile, even for increasing salaries for nurses in the health care industry, in the USA the improved image has to have a positive profit-based motivation.
Many possibilities: firstly by reducing costs from excessive profits, insurance company staffing, "management", etc. Secondly by increasing revenue, e.g. from reducing corporate tax loopholes & increasing corporate tax rates.
I like the ship you’re sailing :), I’m onboard. Sadly, I don’t think this sailboat has enough of us on it to change the momentum of capitalistic incentives or US policy.
I hope one day it does, but until then “who’s gonna pay for the salary increase?”
If the virus is endemic, what even is the point of all this testing? What does is accomplish besides telling you “yup, this test says you have a virus”? I never got tested for respiratory viruses before when I got sick. Why this one?
We cannot move on until we eliminate all this mass testing. Yes test for confirmation before administering something specific to Covid but testing somebody whose only medical issue is something that can be bought over the counter… what is the point?
All this testing is just causing chaos in peoples lives.
Testing is so you know if you have COVID and you don't go and spread it. And the reason you don't go and spread it is because hospitals have limited capacity - and healthcare workers haver limited energy - so we want to avoid people dying due to lack of proper medical care.
This has been the entire point of mitigation efforts from day one.
So why aren’t we testing for the cold and the flu? Those are just as endemic as Covid and they mutate every year too. Why test specifically for Covid?
What useful information does knowing you have Covid instead of the myriad of other respiratory viruses actually provide? The treatment for all of them is gonna be basically the same for like 99% of all cases.
If we know we have Covid we can avoid spreading it, and we avoid spreading it because it threatens our healthcare capacity. That is why we test. The common cold and flu do not spread nearly as easily and don't result in such frequent hospitalization. Yes, taking extra mitigation efforts to prevent the spread of the flu, such as widespread testing, may spare us a few hospital beds. But the return on investment is very low. With Covid, it is very high, since each case of Covid stands to spread more readily than a case of the flu, and each case is more likely to result in hospitalization. It's the hospitalizations that matter ultimately, the same now as when the pandemic began, and all mitigation efforts serve that end.
I think it is great that omicron can propagate like this. The severity seems to be quite low. That means that everybody will be immune and we can move on.
We should remove as well those mask and vaccine coercion, but I don't think that will happen.
I personally look at the raw data of death. I believe that most data you would get around COVID have bias, and only overall data speak the truth.
Look at what happened in Europe: https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps
(This does not include hospitalizations)
First of, you realize that the pandemic is not at all what we have been told. We can observe an increase in death in the winters, but somewhere like peaks with 10% more deaths than the years beforehand.
You realize that for the 0-44 age group, there has been NO PANDEMIC.
So from the beginning, we should just let this age group live normally. (no mask, no restrictions, no mandatory vaccine, no pass, no isolation)
Then comes the other age groups > 44, that did have excess death especially during winters. We should focus on the care to them and allow them to have a better access to their doctor, even when positive. Equip all of them with early treatment pack (antiviral and antibiotics for the first phase, anticoagulant and anti-inflammatory for the second). Provide them access to vaccines, only if they want to take them as it is an experimental treatment.
The main reason why the hospitals got over populated is because we told people to isolate and not see their doctors. They wait to be really sick and have no choice than going to the hospital.
Then come the health structure. We should just double the wages of all the nurses, auxiliary, GP, emergency doctors.
Allow quick formations for unemployed and military to become auxiliary.
And if you think we cannot pay for that, think about the cost of a single day of nation wide lockdown.
We aren't short on 'resources', we are short on doctors and nurses.
It doesn't matter how much money you throw at things, the number of doctors isn't going to change drastically. You can pay them 10x and the number won't change. We only have so many medical schools, and so many people willing to throw themselves on the sword to get through them.
Nurses are a little more flexible in that more money might mean more nurses, but only up to a point.
In either case, throwing a ton more people into a long term career to deal with a short term problem (I don't see hospitals needing the same capacity in 3 years that they do for the next wave) will cause other problems down the road.
> It doesn't matter how much money you throw at things, the number of doctors isn't going to change drastically.
I don't think that's true. If being a doctor had the same work:pay ratio as being a SW dev I think you'd have more smart people choosing that career. Health regulations and extra procedures certainly helped to discourage employment as well, but I think pay would help.
> I don't see hospitals needing the same capacity in 3 years
The baby boomers are just starting to enter their mid 70s. Sure, it may not reach COVID-surge levels, but they are going to need a lot of health care.
> If being a doctor had the same work:pay ratio as being a SW dev I think you'd have more smart people choosing that career. Health regulations and extra procedures certainly helped to discourage employment as well, but I think pay would help.
I just have the compulsive need as the son of a nurse, who is now dating a nurse: nurses could use the monetary incentive, too.
And I have to feel the vast amount of regulatory paperwork doctors (and other medical providers) have to go through is a constant nagging discouragement. I mean, I think that evolved for good reasons, to help create accountability to to ease care when the patient enters a different part of the system, but holy crap, it’s a lot of forms to fill out as a medical care worker.
> If being a doctor had the same work:pay ratio as being a SW dev
1) No matter how much the pay goes up for doctors, medical schools are still only going to have so much capacity, capacity which is artificially constrained. We are already at a place where many more people that are highly competent and intelligent want to be doctors than are actually able to become doctors simply because of medical school bandwidth.
2) Work:Pay ratio is already higher depending on the kind of medicine you do, but even lower pay programs still have no problem filling up.
The issue in the US clearly is not incentive, it's the obstacles, both administrative and personal. I could go on a rant about not every doctor needing to be the best and brightest, but that'd be off topic.
> The baby boomers are just starting to enter their mid 70s. Sure, it may not reach COVID-surge levels, but they are going to need a lot of health care.
Seeing as how that's near the end of life expectancy, demand for care should actually start to fall in the near future. Maybe it increases slightly short term, but we'll be on the other side of that in less than 10 years.
> We aren't short on 'resources', we are short on doctors and nurses.
When I say "resources", people are included in that. Human resources one might call it.
> Nurses are a little more flexible in that more money might mean more nurses, but only up to a point.
In either case, throwing a ton more people into a long term career to deal with a short term problem (I don't see hospitals needing the same capacity in 3 years that they do for the next wave) will cause other problems down the road.
I understand what you mean but I think you greatly underestimate how many nurses work contract and are not employed by hospitals. Almost all nurses I know, and I know quite a few, are all working as contractors for agencies. The hospital assignments are just almost never worth it.
> Why, in 2 years of this pandemic, have we not devoted the resources to expanding bed capacity and staffing hospitals?
When have we ( assuming you are US, forgive me ) ever devoted resources to anything other than the military industrial complex and tax-cuts for the rich?
We don't HAVE resources. We have already scraped out every piece of public spending and public works program out of our budgets.
You expect us to be able to just scale back up after systematically disassembling our university[0] and medical systems over the past 30 years?
OK, we increase capacity. We save a few people, so what? We are running a BUSINESS HERE. We can't have any extra capacity, that would cut into profits! Plus we are still low after paying $600 per insulin shot last month.
Besides, haven't you heard? Everyone made a killing off the pandemic! It was great for business! BCBS posted 2 billion in profit last year! Don't worry your little head: Our healthcare and technology CEOs didn't have to sell their private jets or wait on buying that new yacht they have been eyeing.
This is what neoliberalism looks like. Every drop of blood drained out of public spending, so we can reroute it to whoever gives our senators the largest bribe.
0: Which creates professionals upon which US healthcare depends
Thank you. I've also been trying to get this across to other people as well. And here's the worst part. If and when another high-spread virus emerges in the future, there will not be a vaccine available at the beginning, which is also when hospital overwhelming is most critical. So we will be in the exact same situation. I can't believe no one is talking about improving the hospital infrastructure to handle the inevitable next virus. Are there things happening in this regard and I am just out of the loop?
Having enough excess capacity in healthcare systems to cope with potential future pandemics is too expensive. You'd need a lot more medical staff, plus more equipment and hospital bed capacity.
There would be a perception for a lot of the time that the cost of all of these things is wasteful - whether you're talking about public or private healthcare.
Not being able to say when the next pandemic might occur is going to make it a hard sell - how do you tell taxpayers or shareholders that you need to keep extra staff on retainer for something that may not happen for 100 years?
If you put these extra staff to use on other types of (non-essential) healthcare, then you're going to have to cancel all of that when the next pandemic happens. That will then lead to backlogs as operations are cancelled, screening isn't carried out etc. - and you're back to healthcare having to shut down.
Also, what do you plan for? Not every pandemic is the same.
I'm more interested in how Jeff manages to maintain 200 open source repos and still have time for all the other extracurricular he does like the graphics card RPi testing he has going on. Please tell me your time management secrets.
Two things: saying no to the majority of time requests (it used to be very hard for me, but now I realize the power it gives me over my own time), and focusing on one task until it's done (I have a few Trello boards and have gotten more religious about 'WIP' during my working hours... though I probably hang out on HN and Reddit a bit too much still).
Definitely not off topic. I do not use Obsidian but while Obsidian is a knowledge base software, I can absoslutely see the appeal of being able to organize your thoughts and notes into a full-fledged article and then push to something like Bookstack for public/team consumption.
The comments in HN threads regarding the vaccines are bizarre. The majority of stances here essentially boil down to "the vaccine is fine" vs "the vaccine is bad."
The majority of the comments that I see in this thread have to do with the FDA, FOIA, and transparency, with only a scarce few comments that are black-and-white like you described.
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine.
> Eschew flamebait. [Which is essentially impossible on this topic if one is to disagree.]
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
This is offset by other guidelines, although it seems that erring on the side of harmony & homogeneity is preferred (which if the goal is entertainment, is probably right: HN is a site for intellectual curiosity, not epistemology):
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
> Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.
> A good critical comment teaches us something.
> It tramples curiosity. [Implying curiosity is good/acceptable.]
It's more than just human nature this time around. Something about this whole polarization and specifically this stuff with Covid is just firing off alarm bells in my head.
OpenSea is a great example of break the law until you get caught and then pay a small fine. They just haven't reached the "get caught" part yet. Putting utter ridiculousness of NFTs aside, a lot of the art on the site is straight up stolen and artist have very little recourse in what they can do. Here is a good Twitter thread from Loish summarizing the state of affairs for artist https://nitter.net/loishh/status/1470340143970230277
Art can't be stolen by NFTs because NFTs don't contain content, only links to content. When you buy an NFT, you're buying some metadata containing a URL of some art -- a pointer. Artists that are upset about hyperlinks to copyrighted images should go after the hosting servers with DMCA claims or the equivalent.
Consider: Is an NFT that points to another NFT stolen?
The thing is, NFT folks can't have it both ways. The advocates say it's not a URL - it's the art you're buying, that it's going to support artists, that everyone can share in the rewards.
As soon as something goes wrong, well it's actually a URL so take it up with Google, a centralized service, and file a DMCA take-down.
No matter what these grifters are taking advantage of the artist and the buyer.
> The advocates say it's not a URL - it's the art you're buying
I've found that most NFT advocates will agree that you are only paying for a receipt on the blockchain that some central service like OpenSeas equates to you 'owning' a piece of art, and maybe the original artist too, but only conceptually and not legally (services that include signing over copyright notwithstanding).
That this is mostly a status symbol for the wealthy to dump cash into, like digital diamonds, is also a not uncommon view - but the difference is that they think that is a valuable end unto itself, and people like myself don't.
I mean, at some point isn't it reasonable to expect people to do some basic due diligence before dropping 10k on some metadata. If they don't, who's fault is that really?
Read the spec. Jeez (not aimed at you, just generalized exasperation).
I wouldn't go that far. I think there's legitimate value in a digital product that is one-of-a-kind for which the creator is cryptographically prevented from duplicating in an undetectable way. I think there's also value in the idea of some attributes of the instance not being settled or known until the initial transaction completes.
This early phase where NFTs contain URLs to images hosted off-chain is just a situation where an example used to explain the concept ("it's like art") blew up in a completely hilarious way.
how is buying a URL from an artist not supporting the artist. whether you are buying metadata or data seems irrelevant, if the claim is that the money supports the creator through patronage.
buying from the imposter artist obviously doesnt provide patronage to the original artist. that applies to both the NFT world and any other part of commerce in the world.
people arguing here are conflating three or four arguments to create a disingenuous point. the "cant have it both ways" quip stems from a false dichotomy.
.
you are buying a url not a picture. correct
buying a url from the original artist supports the original artist. correct
buying a url from the wrong artist does not support the original artist. correct
there is no logical inconsistency or contradiction.
advocates can claim you are buying the picture at the end of the url all the want, but unless the sales contract includes exclusive reproduction rights, that claim is incorrect and has nothing to do with patronage itself.
Art can't be stolen by NFTs, it can be stolen (for a slightly loose definition of steal, including copyright infringement and wire fraud) by people selling NFTs though.
Openseas looks to be serving up the images, and according to that thread they aren't respecting DMCA requests ("apparently the only way to get them removed is by writing individual emails for each listing"), that's illegal, intentionally doing that is criminal. The people uploading the art without a license are breaking the law regardless of whether or not the site respects the DMCA. The people fraudulently representing themselves as the original artist when they aren't are breaking the law.
That's a good clarification. My point is that there's nothing special happening here legally just because cryptocurrency is involved. It's illegal to distribute copyrighted content without appropriate licenses.
I don't believe anyone ever said it was illegal because cryptocurrency is involved... Indeed this thread started with the comment "[...] Putting utter ridiculousness of NFTs aside [...]
I'd also emphasize the fraud part more here, it's not just copyright infringement, it's lying about authorship for financial gain, that's a separate (and in my mind much more serious) crime.
They're hosting copyrighted material (images, perhaps just cached?) without permission. They had a takedown process that they've now eschewed in favor of making artists give up more personal details to get something taken down.
The interesting problem here is that they have started giving artists and their takedown requests the runaround. Like they're running out the clock and trying to placate the bots for as long as possible without taking things down. The intent and actions here is what may get them in trouble.
Artists can go to their host directly (Google) but that doesn't mean that OpenSeas isn't liable the same way torrent sites might be for their users' content.
I work with a pixel artist whose work was sold on OpenSea. The "owners" of the NFTs certainly didn't seem to understand the nuances you've commented in this thread with - they (and all their buddies) straight up harassed him on every online channel they could find him demanding to talk about "ownership" or otherwise spamming obnoxious and obscene things. So it's not just potential IP theft and fraud, it's also harassment from an army of crypto cultists who don't even understand what it is they're rallying around.
Consider for a moment that I am comic book artist and have made a wonderful popular series. I consider myself a purist so I've decided to decline offers for merchandising and make plenty of cash just off of comic sales alone. You figure people would really want a t-shirt with my character on it and so you start printing some and selling them - it even turns into an overnight success and suddenly my comic sales are up because memes have caused the character to go mainstream.
You've used my creation without my license in a way that certainly violates current law - just because I had eschewed merchandising myself and just because your impact on my sales was positive and not negative - doesn't negate that you took my creative work and profited off of it without any meaningful fair use exception (like making a transformative work).
The NFT you could create to my photo has value because it's to my photo - additionally it prevents me from releasing an NFT and profiting similarly whether or not I ever chose to do so.
Go ahead and create a Mickey Mouse NFT and see just how many seconds it takes for Disney to crush you into the ground - then realize that the only reason most NFTs of unlicensed material go unchallenged is because there isn't a clear precedent yet established that makes it a knock out case - but there absolutely will be.
I am pretty sure, legally speaking that for both 1, 2 and 3 The answer is Yes - but generally nobody cares.
I'd briefly clarify that IANAL so take everything with a grain of salt but I suspect that if you publish my email address in a manner to invite harassment without me being a public figure you could be served a take down notice to force its removal - similar things have happened with people publishing the addresses of private individuals.
I suspect that if you linked to my favorite picture of me relaxing on the beach in the middle of you describing some truly offensive opinions I'd have a right to disassociate my image from your content.
Lastly there's a classic "loophole" (which isn't it's illegal) to get around requiring a liquor license by selling maps to a location where booze can be freely required - I think that's a pretty good mark of precedent that references to things can be equated with the things themselves in the view of the law.
If I printed some t-shirts with some notable trademarks on them and didn't offer to sell you one - but did sell you some instructions so that you could pick it up by getting a key out of such-and-such postbox and then opening a safe in the alley behind the parking lot - I'm pretty sure that carries the exact same legal implications as directly selling you a shirt I'd printed without a license.
Am I correct in understanding your position as saying that a member of the public offering a URL without the explicit permission of site operator may not just be against the site's TOS but may be illegal?
If that's the case, then yes, I would agree that using a URL would require permission from the site operator. That would basically bring to a halt the Internet, but yes.
In the context of NFTs, it presents a real problem because they are immutable. If the NFT contains a URL that is not authorized or if the authorization is subsequently withdrawn for any reason, then the NFT is tainted but cannot be destroyed.
There's probably a start up idea around creating a catalog of tainted and untainted NFTs where regulated entities like Coinbase, OpenSea would pay to determine whether there are any claims against an NFT by a rightsholder. But, if OpenSea isn't implementing a proper DMCA process right now, they're probably an unlikely partner and there's not really a deep moat around that idea anyway.
I think that most URLs would fall under fair use - generally linked content is being explicitly commented on in the linking content. I'm curious if this has ever gone to court though and I imagine it has.
Thank you as well! It's interesting reading material.
I'd also mention that I find the current level to which trademarks and creative works gain protection to be excessive - so I don't really morally agree with how everything works today - but I do think that these parallels likely would cross over to the NFT domain in a pretty predictable way with laws as they currently are.
Forget OpenSea. If Wikipedia willfully displays unlicensed images taken from Getty Images, Getty Images could get them taken down using existing legal tools.
Isn't the NFT selling the premise that the owner of the NFT owns the art being pointed to? Maybe it isn't theft but it does seem to be fraud? Or if the argument is that NFTs don't convey some sort of ownership over the thing it points to, what's even the point of NFTs?
No, what's being sold is ownership of a unique set of metadata stored in a blockchain. There's nothing connecting a NFT to an underlying asset.
It's like if I gave you the opportunity to buy the words "The Empire State Building" written on a napkin with a promise to never write those words on any other napkin. You might buy that if, say, I was famous. That's an NFT. You're not the new owner of the Empire State building.
I admit I don't understand NFTs much, but would a reasonable analogy be a photograph? I could take a picture of the Empire State Building, sell you the rights to the picture? Except, with an NFT, it's a blockchain identified bit of numbers rather than a picture?
This reminds me of the old eBay scam where the listing would be worded in such a way as not to actually say that you got more than the picture of whatever was listed, but people bought it as their expectation was inherently different and they assumed the sale to be for the actual product.
But the complaint is that people are selling the rights to pictures via NFTs that they don't have the rights to sell in the first place, isn't it?
So the analogy would be that some third party took a copy of your photograph of the building and sold the rights to it despite them not having the ability to do so?
Dont confuse selling a picture for selling the rights to a picture.
An NFT could include the rights to the actual art itself, but most likely youre buying a sole reproduction. Similar to how going and buying a copy of a photograph at the store doesnt necessarily give you the explicit right to reproduce it for profit. Copyright is different from possession. NFTs are possession, unless they spell out that the purchase also transfers the copyright.
No, the complaint is that OpenSea is distributing images that were uploaded by users that lack licenses to do so and that OpenSea does not have a compliant DMCA process. Therefore it is being asserted that OpenSea cannot claim a 512(c) exemption from liability.
In other words, the complaint is that when you curl e.g. https://images.opensea.com/some-pixel-artwork it returns a PNG of the pixel art without adequate license metadata, and there's no one to talk to that will fix the issue.
What if, instead of copyrighted works, we put people as an NFT? IE, OpenSea could sell an NFT of Donald Trump, as represented by bits on the blockchain.
> Isn't the NFT selling the premise that the owner of the NFT owns the art being pointed to?
Correct. The victims here are both the buyer (who bought thinking they purchased from the creator) and the creator (who would have earned that revenue if they created the NFT).
The solution is really just better moderation and UX- OpenSea needs to make it easy to determine whether the creator is actually the creator, or just someone who re-uploaded the content.
I mean in many countries torrent search/website operators were prosecuted despite only hosting links/metadata. e.g. People involved with The Pirate Bay.
I feel bad about DMCA being used at all.
I don’t want anyone prosecuted for sharing information. I’m just mentioning that the “it’s just links” defense might not hold up, based on prior events.
Embedding copyrighted images into social media posts without the necessary publishing rights has already been found to be illegal in some cases:[1]
> Federal courts are split, and recent rulings found that embedding social media posts on third-party websites could be copyright infringement.
> Some decisions have even stated that while social media sites “clearly foresee the possibility of entities…using web embeds to share other users’ content, none of them expressly grants a sublicense to those who embed publicly posted content.” The courts rejected motions to dismiss for fair use, stating that sharing such content is not a transformative use.
A seller who embeds a copyrighted image into an NFT marketplace listing without the necessary publishing rights and then sells the NFT would be more likely to be liable for copyright infringement than the social media embedder. This is because commercial use of copyrighted content is less likely to satisfy the fair use criteria:[2]
> Purpose and character of the use, including whether the use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes: Courts look at how the party claiming fair use is using the copyrighted work, and are more likely to find that nonprofit educational and noncommercial uses are fair. This does not mean, however, that all nonprofit education and noncommercial uses are fair and all commercial uses are not fair; instead, courts will balance the purpose and character of the use against the other factors below. Additionally, “transformative” uses are more likely to be considered fair. Transformative uses are those that add something new, with a further purpose or different character, and do not substitute for the original use of the work.
Someone who sells an NFT without publishing rights is harming the market for NFTs derived from the copyrighted work. This also reduces the chance that a fair use defense would be accepted in court:[2]
> Effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work: Here, courts review whether, and to what extent, the unlicensed use harms the existing or future market for the copyright owner’s original work. In assessing this factor, courts consider whether the use is hurting the current market for the original work (for example, by displacing sales of the original) and/or whether the use could cause substantial harm if it were to become widespread.
Let's give OpenSea the benefit of doubt and say they don't know their platform is being used to illegally sale things the distributor doesn't own. I see no reason they shouldn't be held to the same copyright rules that Youtube is after the Youtube vs Viacom judgement that says Youtube has to put forth a good faith effort to upholding copyright on their site. As far as I know OpenSea has no tools to do. If they are seeking a 13B valuation then they absolutely have the resources to implement tool for artist to more easily protect their work and seek compensation if their work is stolen and sold. Also people saying "I see no difference between OpenSea and eBay" are naive. The dose makes the poison and it is much easier for me to steal some artist work and sell it as an NFT than it is for me to steal my neighbor's phone and sell it on eBay. There is a huge risk in getting caught and both eBay as well as cell phone manufacturers have tools in place to reduce theft such as blacklisting the stolen phone's IMEI.
Let's not shift the goalposts too much. The OP was claiming that OpenSea is breaking the law. That's a serious claim. Serious claims require serious evidence. So I asked which law(s) is OpenSea breaking. Not having automated IP infringement detection tools is AFAIK not illegal, and so is irrelevant to the discussion (though a two-second web search showed that OpenSea has a FAQ page on the procedure for reporting IP violations [1]). So again, my question is which law(s) is OpenSea violating, as that is what OP is claiming, without any evidence.
NFTs are not a container in which a stolen artwork can be placed. This current trend of art NFTs are roughly an HTML <img> tag that only one person can own but anyone can read. When the image source url is loaded it resolves to some image.
TLDR: Links are being sold, not art. Not stolen art. You can't steal art and put it into an NFT because NFTs don't carry image data (as currently defined in ERC-721).
I am certainly not playing with semantics. I think you may be very confused about what an NFT is.
You may be familiar with JSON. Can you imagine a JSON document with a URL attribute? Now can you imagine selling that JSON document to someone else? That's an NFT (sans some crypto that makes duplicating that document impossible).
You may be familiar with HTML. Imagine selling a hyperlink to someone else. Literally the string '<a href="...">' tag. That's an NFT (sans some crypto that makes duplicating that string impossible).
Nothing is being sold other than the ownership of one unique JSON document or one unique HTML string.
If people want to believe that a picture of the Empire State building makes them the new owners of the Empire State building, I don't know what to say.
Providing an interface to smart contractors on ethereum and other blockchains. /s
Other than that one employee that was caught front running and was then terminated I see nothing illegal or even close to illegal. There is no difference between opensee and ebay other than that only NFTs are sold.
What do people generally mean when they talk about "stolen art" w.r.t. NFTs?
1. Hackers acquiring private keys and stealing an actual NFT (the token) and moving it into an account they control. Aside from the base-level cryptocurrency malware/phishing, this doesn't seem prevalent, and is really the only thing in this list I'd describe as actual theft.
2. Non-artist creates an NFT using someone else's art, without their knowledge or permission. This might be a copyright violation, depending on the terms set by the original artist when publishing their work. Maybe it's a derived work... is "this jpeg but as an NFT" art in and of itself? I don't think so, but what do I know. This seems like what you're referring to here.
3. Artist creates an NFT of a jpeg of their own art, and then either sells or keeps the NFT. Later, someone views the corresponding jpeg in their web browser, right-click -> save-as, now they have a digital print of art that they paid nothing for. I've seen NFT cryptobros sensationally refer to this as "right click fraud," but it really just sounds like crocodile tears. I mean, really. Everybody knows how browsers work. This is one of the many examples of why NFTs are utterly stupid, but this also seems like it would be a copyright violation, at best.
4. Various combinations of 2. and 3. Maybe you right-click "stole" some images from one NFT, and then mint your own NFT of bit-identical images on a different chain. Or maybe you modified the image encoding so that the images are pixel-identical but not bit-identical, and minted NFTs on the same chain. This is all still just "maybe a copyright violation" until you try to pass it off as something it isn't, and then it's "maybe fraud" as well.
I figured that by inside your living room they were referring to streaming rather than to disc rental. I agree that disc rental services (regardless of provider, in my experience) have very good selections.
̶A̶l̶s̶o̶,̶ ̶h̶e̶r̶e̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶U̶K̶,̶ ̶N̶e̶t̶f̶l̶i̶x̶ ̶n̶e̶v̶e̶r̶ ̶o̶f̶f̶e̶r̶e̶d̶ ̶a̶ ̶d̶i̶s̶c̶ ̶r̶e̶n̶t̶a̶l̶ ̶s̶e̶r̶v̶i̶c̶e̶.̶ edit: I'm mistaken, they used to. There's just one provider left here that does (called Cinema Paradiso).
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This seems like an ego issue honestly. Like you feel like you are being taken advantage of. If only a very small numbers of users are doing this then I don't see it worth the dev time to block the email providers they use possibly hurting valid customers. Just leave it alone. I use Relay for services I genuinely pay for but don't want to give out my email address in case of leaks.