How often do you read the Ts and Cs?

Most of us don’t care. We just click. Even in the good old days of paper-printed documentation, did you read the terms and conditions? You’re sitting with the salesperson and there’s 5,000 words on a page that look like standard conditions. Do you read them?

Nah, most of us don’t.

I always remember a gaming company who, for a joke, built into the Ts and Cs that by clicking and downloading, you gave them your soul which they could legitimately sell to the devil if they wanted.

The prank, which was designed to highlight that terms and conditions are almost never read, fooled all 7,500 customers who made a purchase that day, a company spokesman said. 

I therefore found it interesting that, in the lastst mega NFT sale, Warner Brothers are offering limited-edition multimedia NFT versions of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, the film originally made by Peter Jackson. In a partnership with blockchain company Eluvio, Warner Bros have launched ‘The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (Extended Version) Web3 Movie Experience’.

You can find all the details here, and maybe buy your LotR NFT. Here are a few comments from Coindesk about the launch.

So, are you excited? Gonna buy a unique LotR NFT?

Maybe not.

Nacho Harriague shared via LinkedIn that the Terms of Service state: “You acknowledge and agree that the NFT Media is provided under license and not sold” and “any NFT Media that you receive.... may become unavailable at any time”.

In other words, you buy the NFT but you own nothing. It can be deleted whenever the studios decide they want to delete it. It’s not yours.

This is where this whole world of recording, owndership, permissions, value and transactions get confusing and interesting. I’m old school. I like physical assets and clear provenance. Whilst we have a thousand blockchians competing to record transactions, I cannot see clear provenance. In a hundred years, how can I prove that frame of film is mine? I can prove it when I have the film in front of me, but if it’s purely a digital record warpped up in an NFT that the studio owners can claim is not mine, or delete …

Of course, the world is changing. Films are no longer made with physical records in some cases. By way of example, I tried to buy a frame from the Lion King and the auctioneer said that they don’t sell frames anymore, because the whole thing was created digitially. So be it.

As we move in this 100% digitised world, we have to realise that physical assets are no longer required. In some ways, that’s a good thing. When I move house, I don’t need to pack my 1,000 vinyl recorsd collection in boxes as they’re all on my phone. DVDs, Blu-ray and all that stuff is in the bin. But, in other words, ti’s bad. I miss the album cover and I miss the collections of memorabilia I ahd built over the years. Ah well, c’est la vie.

Meanwhile, is the NFT of a frame of a film that you don’t own, and can be deleted any second by the movie studio worth it? You tell me …