Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

> the other is a weird misleading way to rent to people.

There's nothing weird or misleading about it, and it's got zero to do with renting.

It's simply like a real estate broker commission, gallery commission, or whatever.

The concept of a commission has existed for a long, long, long time.




> It's simply like a real estate broker commission, gallery commission, or whatever.

Except that its not at all like that. You pay a commission to someone who helped you sell something - they did work to help you sell it and you compensate them. Paying an automatic comission fee to the artist upon sale makes no sense. What are they doing to earn that commission? You already paid for their art. It makes no sense to pay again. What this is cannot be called a "comission".

I can see a situation where the artist is paid in total a very small fraction of the total price the art was sold for. Eg in the situation someone brought up where an artist sells a painting for $10,000 and then a few years later its sold for $1 million, I can see the artist maybe getting 10% of the margin between those sales (eg 0.1*(1 million - 10,000)). But even that is dubious to me, since a sale already took place. It just seems really weird to me and I think it has to be justified further than just "this is good for artists" or "artists need more money". Certainly calling it a commission is not at all accurate.


I get that you don't like it.

That still doesn't make it weird or misleading or "renting". It's straightforward and clear and ownership.

You're correct in that it's not exactly the same as previous models. It's a somewhat new innovation. And isn't it great to try new things?

Perhaps you'd prefer to think of it as more like a transaction tax, which exists in many localities when you sell real estate. E.g. NYC has a 1% transaction tax on sales over $1MM. But here the tax goes to the creator rather than the government.


Sure. Its an interesting new idea. I can see that it might have reasonable use cases, but its not clear to me whether its actually an improvement over other kinds of contracts. It would also have technical problems in the case of key change - if the owner has their keys compromised and needs to transfer the record to a new address, do they pay a fee to the original creator for that? And this happens in perpetuity?




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: