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A perfectly rational approach. Unfortunately, both the Copyright Office and the Patent Office take a different view – in their view (supported at this point by two federal cases) only a human can create and creating the machine that creates doesn’t qualify. Higher courts may side with your view, or Congress may resolve the issue, but at this point legal authority rejects the approach. Which is not to say that is a good result.

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samak

Lots of interesting questions. Unfortunately, most are still open questions at the moment.

For those who are confused by NFTs, here’s how I think about them. (For those who are not confused by NFTS – yes, you are.)

An NFT is (almost always) nothing more than proof of ownership of something that is located somewhere else. (The reason actual digital goods are not usually stored on the blockchain itself is because storage cost per byte is high.) What the “something” is depends on the terms of the contract that created or transferred that something. For example, an NFT linked to digital artwork does not typically convey ownership of the copyright in the artwork, any more than purchase of a copy of a real world book would transfer ownership of the copyright in the book or purchase of a Ford 150 would transfer ownership of the plant that built it.

In a sense, the certificate of title to your car or the deed to your house is an NFT if you take a broad view of what a token is. Both are non-fungible, because there is only one of your car or house. What distinguishes blockchain NFTs from these forms of “proof of ownership” is that no government authority controls the records. That means that there are no standards for what transfer means – again, that is determined by the contract that creates or transfers the NFT. And if one party to the contract goes out of business – or just decides not to perform – the NFT will establish ownership of the right to complain about that.

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AlexEiffel, Douglas, Simon_Weel, ibe98765, OscarCP

If you want to see the full text of the bill, you need to do a little more work than just following the link. After a bill is signed into law, it goes to the Government Printing Office to be printed. They note on the website that, while that usually takes a day or two, large bills are an exception.  This is the quintessential “large bill”.  So the link shows “not yet printed” – and may show that for some time.  If you go to the “text” tab at the bottom of the page and select “enrolled bill” the text will appear.

Or if that isn’t your idea of time well spent, you could go directly to

https://www.congress.gov/bill/<wbr />116th-congress/house-bill/133/<wbr />text/enr

which will work until the GPO gets around to printing it.

Thanks for the correction.  Heisenberg might not think it small!

didn’t mean that to be anonymous
Moderator Edit: Now fixed

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Will Fastie