Miramax Sues Quentin Tarantino Over ‘Pulp Fiction’ NFT Auction

[Frank Cox]

https://variety.com/2021/film/news/m...ft-1235113383/

Miramax filed a lawsuit on Tuesday accusing Quentin Tarantino of copyright infringement by selling NFTs based on the screenplay for “Pulp Fiction.”

Tarantino announced the sale at a recent crypto-art convention in New York.

“I’m excited to be presenting these exclusive scenes from ‘Pulp Fiction’ to fans,” Tarantino said in a Nov. 2 press release.

The plan is to auction off NFT — non-fungible tokens — based on excerpts from Tarantino’s original handwritten script for the film, accompanied by commentary. The NFT is pitched as “secret,” meaning that its contents will be viewable exclusively by the owner.

But according to the suit, Tarantino did not consult beforehand with Miramax — which still owns the rights to the director’s 1994 classic. Miramax’s attorneys have sent a cease and desist letter seeking to block the sale, but that has not stopped Tarantino and his team from moving forward.

Miramax alleges that Tarantino’s actions have interfered with the studio’s own plans to enter the market for “Pulp Fiction” NFTs.

In a statement, Miramax attorney Bart Williams accused Tarantino’s team of a “deliberate, pre-meditated, short-term money grab.”

“This group chose to recklessly, greedily, and intentionally disregard the agreement that Quentin signed instead of following the clear legal and ethical approach of simply communicating with Miramax about his proposed ideas,” Williams said. “This one-off effort devalues the NFT rights to ‘Pulp Fiction,’ which Miramax intends to maximize through a strategic, comprehensive approach.”

The suit appears to turn on the question of whether selling NFTs based on excerpts of a screenplay qualify as a “publication” of the screenplay. According to the suit, Tarantino’s lawyer has told Miramax that Tarantino retained the right to publish his screenplay in the Miramax contract, and that he is exercising that right through the NFT sale.

Miramax argues that NFTs are a one-time sale, and are not equivalent to publication of a screenplay, and that therefore Miramax owns the NFT rights.

The suit states claims of breach of contract, copyright infringement, trademark infringement and unfair competition.

Tarantino’s representative declined to comment.

[Frank Angel]

So will one of these tokens get me on the subway?

[Bobby Henderson]

I can't wait for the fads around NFTs, crypto-currency, etc to finally jump the shark. It's really absurd what people are willing to funnel money into these days.

[Frank Cox]

I guess it comes down to the whole fools and money thing. At least with the Dutch Tulip market bubble you actually got a tulip. A NFT is just a multimillion dollar number.

The same thing goes for bitcoin and all that too.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/25/2...rls-links-ipfs

Your million-dollar NFT can break tomorrow if you’re not careful

Open up the $69 million NFT that Beeple sold at Christie’s, and you won’t find much. The name of the artwork isn’t there. The name of the artist is missing. And crucially, you won’t even find the actual piece of art.

That’s not a flaw in Beeple’s NFT — it’s just how the system works.

It turns out, the house of cards that is the NFT system is even more precarious than it first appears. NFTs are fundamentally built on trust — trust that a seller won’t screw you over, trust that these tokens magically have value — and that holds true even at the deepest level of the system. Ultimately, you’re buying a collection of metadata defining what you own.

But there’s one significant gap in the system ensuring that an NFT is held together: NFTs use links to direct you to somewhere else where the art and any details about it are being stored. And as anyone who has browsed the internet before should know, links can and do die. So what happens if your NFT breaks down and points to nothing?

“That’s an awfully expensive 404 error for buyers of these NFTs,” Aaron Perzanowski, a law professor at Case Western Reserve University and co-author of The End of Ownership, wrote in an email to The Verge.

NFTs are digital tokens used to buy and sell digital art. But unlike a painting, which can be placed in a buyer’s home, an NFT is more like a piece of paper saying you own something — generally, a digital illustration or a video. Sometimes, a weird-looking cat.

What’s an NFT?

NFTs allow you to buy and sell ownership of unique digital items and keep track of who owns them using the blockchain. NFT stands for “non-fungible token,” and it can technically contain anything digital, including drawings, animated GIFs, songs, or items in video games. An NFT can either be one-of-a-kind, like a real-life painting, or one copy of many, like trading cards, but the blockchain keeps track of who has ownership of the file.
NFTs have been making headlines lately, some selling for millions of dollars, with high-profile memes like Nyan Cat and the “deal with it” sunglasses being put up for auction. There’s also a lot of discussion about the massive electricity use and environmental impacts of NFTs.If you (understandably) still have questions, you can read through our NFT FAQ.

The system usually relies on the Ethereum blockchain, which ensures a few things: it keeps an unalterable record of everyone who has owned the NFT, and it keeps the NFT from ever changing. That means someone who buys an NFT and then resells it can’t misrepresent what they own. It’s all there in the NFT, just how it was when they bought it. You can think of it like the papers that authenticate a thoroughbred: they’re not the horse, but they certify the provenance and history of one.

Very little data is stored directly inside an NFT, though. The NFT includes information on where you can find a description of the artist’s name and the title of the work, but that information is not typically on the blockchain itself. NFTs include information on where you can find the artwork they represent, but the actual artwork is still a link away.

Traditional URLs pose real problems for NFTs. The owner of the domain could redirect the URL to point to something else (leaving you with, perhaps, a million-dollar Rickroll), or the owner of the domain could just forget to pay their hosting bill, and the whole thing disappears. The animation that Grimes sold for $389,000 is primarily sourced to a pair of traditional URLs, which could break down if either of the two different companies (Nifty Gateway, the auction site; or Cloudinary, the web host) went under. As the buyer, this is something you’d have no control over, unless you’re wealthy enough to buy out the entire domain and pay to keep it online.

To solve that problem, many NFTs turn to a system called IPFS, or InterPlanetary File System. Rather than identifying a specific file at a specific domain, IPFS addresses let you find a piece of content so long as someone somewhere on the IPFS network is hosting it. Grimes’ NFT uses this as a backup, and Beeple’s NFT uses this primarily. That means a multitude of hosts, rather than a single domain owner, could be ensuring these files remain online. This system also gives buyers control. They can pay to keep their NFT’s files online. They still have to remember to pay the hosting bill, but they can host it anywhere in the IPFS network.

Still, the system has flaws. The team behind Check My NFT has been looking inside of NFTs to see if their IPFS addresses actually work, and in several cases, they’ve found files that just won’t load. The team found artworks that were temporarily missing from major artists, including Grimes, deadmau5, and Steve Aoki. The files came back online eventually, but only after the team called attention to their absence. The files have to be actively available on the network for the system to work, and unlike with a domain owner, no host has a singular responsibility to do that for files on IPFS.

“One hard drive crashing could lead to permanent loss of the assets,” the Check My NFT team warned in a message to The Verge.

Like a painting, NFTs need to be maintained. If a buyer purchases an NFT that relies on IPFS, it’ll ultimately be on them to ensure the file continues to be hosted and available to the system. If the NFT relies on a traditional URL, then buyers would be in a more precarious position, having to hope that whatever third party currently hosts the file — often the auction site, like with Grimes’ NFT — stays online.

So there’s a very real chance that, some years from now, an NFT will point to a missing file. If that’s the case, how do you prove what it is you actually own? “You’re still at this stage of evolution of blockchain where you need to have a traditional written contract that tells you what you are getting and that’s enforceable against the seller of that asset,” David Hoppe, managing partner at Gamma Law, told The Verge.

Even if the NFT falls apart, there could be value as long as the artwork still exists


But most buyers don’t exactly have that. Despite the buzz around Ethereum’s “smart contracts,” NFTs typically do not include the literal contract a buyer agrees to with the seller of a work detailing what they’re getting and how they can use it. Those rights are typically just built into an auction site’s terms of service. “In many cases, NFTs offer very little beyond a bare claim of ownership of the NFT itself,” Perzanowski wrote.

Buyers could end up in one of two situations: in one case, they own an NFT with a broken link, but they and the rest of the world understand what artwork it used to represent — say, an extremely expensive collage. So long as that image exists somewhere in the world, it’s possible the NFT would retain value as long as the artist, owner, and prospective buyers all agree on what the token is meant to represent. It is, after all, a system built on trust.

In the other scenario, the image has gone missing, and no one can tell what artwork the NFT was originally tied to. If that’s the case, it’s hard to imagine the NFT would have had much value anyway. You can’t sell a painting that’s been burned or a statue that’s been lost. And an NFT with missing art is just that — nothing to look at.

[Martin McCaffery]

So will one of these tokens get me on the subway?

Trust me friend, in a little time, one of these tokens will allow you to BUY the subway.
In the mean time, I have a bridge you may be interested in.

[Marcel Birgelen]

I want to buy that bridge in exchange for 10 FFT (Furry Fumble Tokens) and 10 million shares of MoviePass.com.

[Frank Cox]

Now this is just getting weird.

https://www.boxofficepro.com/amc-stu...n-no-way-home/

AMC Stubs and Investor Connect Members to Receive Exclusive NFT with Advance Opening Day Tickets for Spider-Man: No Way Home

Exhibition News • Boxoffice Staff • November 28 2021


AMC Stubs Premiere, A-List, and Investor Connect members will have access to a limited run of Spider-Man NFTs with their advance purchase of opening day tickets for Sony’s Spider-Man: No Way Home at any U.S. AMC Theatres location, while supplies last.
Advance tickets for Spider-Man: No Way Home go on sale on November 29. The movie will open exclusively in cinemas on December 16.
Only 86,000 NFTs will be made available for opening day advance ticket buyers, with redemption codes delivered to recipients via email on December 2021 and must be redeemed by March 1. The total production of the NFTs in this partnership between Sony and AMC Theatres is expected to be limited to an overall quantity of 90,000.
Over 100 NFT designs will be available, specially designed by Cub Studios. The NFT giveaway will be valid only for tickets purchased or reserved for December 16 showtimes in all formats at all AMC theaters in the United States, while supplies last. To qualify to receive the NFT, tickets must be purchased or reserved by members of AMC Stubs A-List, Premiere or Investor Connect on AMCTheatres.com or on the AMC mobile app. Those members must have their AMC Stubs account number associated with the transaction, and the movie ticket must be scanned at the theatre when the guest arrives for the movie. If the ticket purchase is refunded or the ticket goes unused, or is not scanned, the NFT code will not be delivered.
The Spider-Man NFT will be available to be redeemed at a dedicated site operated by WAX, an energy efficient, ultra-low carbon footprint blockchain and the first certified carbon neutral. WAX is the most utilized blockchain in the world processing 15 million transactions daily.
Adam Aron, Chairman of the Board and CEO of AMC, commented: “Our AMC Theatres guests and our AMC Entertainment shareholders have been calling for AMC to get into the world of NFTs, and we couldn’t imagine a more perfect way to start doing so than with our good friends at Sony Pictures. This is especially the case in that Spider-Man: No Way Home is one of if not the most anticipated movie of 2021, and the incredibly talented artists at Cub Studios are creating more than 100 unique NFTs giving appropriate respect to this most recent incarnation of the timeless and ever so popular Spider-Man franchise. For those members of our AMC Stubs A-List, AMC Stubs Premiere and AMC Investor Connect program who are among the first to purchase or reserve their ticket to opening day at AMC, this unprecedented Spider-Man NFT is truly a ticket-purchase gift like nothing we’ve ever offered before. But with just 86,000 available, they’re going to go very fast. So, my advice is to get your Spider-Man tickets as quickly as you can.”

[Leo Enticknap]

I think the judge in the Tarantino case should require the plaintiff's attorney to wear a gimp costume throughout the hearing.

[Marcel Birgelen]

Final judgement by flamethrower?