Not for sale · a series on XCOPY’s CC0 · unminted

SAVE AS

A picture that dies of being sold. Eight works by XCOPY, stored whole on the blockchain under the terms of his own public-domain dedication. Anyone may copy any token at any moment and the one they copied is untouched. Every sale puts the work itself through one irreversible pass of generation loss, and after fifteen exchanges only a flat field is left.

8 source works · 256 roots · 64 × 64 · 16 colours · dead at generation 16

A hooded figure with a green face and hot pink glasses against a dark purple ground, flickering between four frames of glitch
Right-click and Save As guy · generation 111,305 bytes, from the chain

The licence is the material

On 1 August 2022 XCOPY put every solo work he had made, and every solo work he would make, into the public domain under CC0. His site says it in four words: no rights reserved. Seven months earlier he had done it to one work on its own.

Right-click and Save As guy is a portrait of the person who saves your JPEG instead of buying it. It minted on SuperRare in December 2018 and first sold for about one ether. Three years later, on 8 December 2021, it sold again for 1,600 ETH, around seven million dollars on the day. The following January its author gave the copyright away, and the sceptic in the picture became legally correct.

What followed was a wave of surface derivatives: the skull, the flicker, a different face. Those gestures needed no licence. You can draw a different skull.

A work that actually requires the CC0 is one that reproduces his own pixels. This does, reduced to what a chain can hold, and it could not have been made about any other artist.

His terms are four words long and posted at xcopy.art/creative-commons: free to use, remix, and build upon, with derivative and collaborative works excluded because those rights were never only his to give. He asks that remixes be posted under #xcopycc0. This is one.

The original does not live on the chain

XCOPY's original Right-click and Save As guy at full resolution: a hooded figure with a green face and hot pink glasses, flickering against a field of purple and green glitch
The original, 2018. 4000 × 4000, nine frames, 11,412 KB. On IPFS.
A hooded figure with a green face and hot pink glasses against a dark purple ground, flickering between four frames of glitch
Ours, generation 1. 64 × 64, four frames, 8,248 bytes. In the contract.

SuperRare token 1154, released 6 December 2018, lists its storage as IPFS. That is true of nearly every famous work in this market, and it is not a complaint: an 11 MB animation had nowhere else to go in 2018 and mostly still does not. The chain holds the record of who owns it. A pinning service holds the picture.

Ours is in the contract, palette and frames and timing, because it is about fourteen hundred times smaller. That is the trade and it is not a free one. Nine frames became four, four thousand pixels across became sixty-four, and a full range of colour became sixteen. What survives is genuinely his and is genuinely not all of him.

Two verbs, doing opposite things

Save. Anyone, any time, for gas. You get a copy of any token as it stands right now, and the one you copied is not touched. You do not have to own it. There is no limit.

Sell. Every transfer damages the token being moved, permanently, and folds the move into the seed that decides how it looks.

The market tells one story about itself, in which the right-click is theft and the trade is the sign of health. The work inverts it. Here the saver is harmless and the flipper is the vandal, and the contract enforces that rather than a manifesto asserting it.

The 256 root tokens are given away by hand, and the consequence was not designed. Because a gift is a transfer, the pristine state cannot be given. Generation 1 exists only in the artist’s hands and ends the moment it is shared.

Works that make transfer meaningful already exist. Sarah Friend’s Lifeforms (2021) die if they are not passed to someone else within ninety days, and once dead they cannot be revived. This one dies because it is passed on. Same mechanism, opposite polarity: there, holding is the sin; here, it is the only thing that is not.

The eight

Eight of XCOPY’s own works, re-encoded to 64 × 64 and sixteen colours and stored on chain. They are animations. His originals run from eight frames to thirty-two, and four of each survive here. All eight are shown at generation 1: pristine, before anything has been done to them, which is the state nobody can be given.

A hooded figure with a green face and hot pink glasses against a dark purple ground, flickering between four frames of glitch
Right-click and Save As guy
A man in a suit, mouth open, rendered in harsh black and white against bands of rainbow glitch
A Coin for the Ferryman
The word EARTH in heavy distressed red letters on black, letterboxed
Echoes of a Dead Earth
Three figures crowded into frame in pink and grey, one raising a hand, one hooded
Last Selfie
A teal and pink face with heart-shaped eyes, dissolving into a field of teal noise
Chatbot and Chill?
Two white forms dripping bright green against grey and black
Greedy Guts
A figure in white and grey against hard magenta, mostly in shadow
The Good Men Who Do Nothing
A deep red scene: a boat, two standing figures, buildings behind, letterboxed
All Time High in the City

This is not an authorised XCOPY work. CC0 grants permission to copy; it grants no permission to imply endorsement.

Sixteen sales

One token, sold fifteen times. Every sale runs one pass of blur and rot over it. The palette halves every fourth generation: sixteen colours, then eight, then four, then two. The frames halve every single one, so the motion is gone by the third while the picture still has thirteen to live. Timing is the first thing a copy loses, which is why the derivatives took the skull and not the flicker.

The whole decay as one animation: the portrait flickers, then rots, the palette collapses to purple and pink, then to a green silhouette on black, and finally to a flat dark field
All sixteen states in sequence. Twenty-eight frames, every one of them rendered by the contract.
Right-click and Save As guy at generation 1 of 16: 16 colours, 4 frames
Generation 116c · 4f
Right-click and Save As guy at generation 3 of 16: 16 colours, 1 frame
Generation 316c · 1f
Right-click and Save As guy at generation 5 of 16: 8 colours, 1 frame
Generation 58c · 1f
Right-click and Save As guy at generation 9 of 16: 4 colours, 1 frame
Generation 94c · 1f
Right-click and Save As guy at generation 13 of 16: 2 colours, 1 frame
Generation 132c · 1f
Right-click and Save As guy at generation 16 of 16: 1 colours, 1 frame
Generation 16Dead

All sixteen, in order

Generation 1 of 16

1

Generation 2 of 16

2

Generation 3 of 16

3

Generation 4 of 16

4

Generation 5 of 16

5

Generation 6 of 16

6

Generation 7 of 16

7

Generation 8 of 16

8

Generation 9 of 16

9

Generation 10 of 16

10

Generation 11 of 16

11

Generation 12 of 16

12

Generation 13 of 16

13

Generation 14 of 16

14

Generation 15 of 16

15

Generation 16 of 16

16

No two the same

Four copies of one source, each of which reached generation 9 by a different sequence of hands. Same lineage, unmistakably one work, and no two of them the same picture. The damage is path-dependent: not how many times a thing was sold but in what order, and to whom. Nobody composed these. Each is a readout of its own ownership.

One of four copies at generation 9, each damaged differently by the route it took
One of four copies at generation 9, each damaged differently by the route it took
One of four copies at generation 9, each damaged differently by the route it took
One of four copies at generation 9, each damaged differently by the route it took

How it is made

The pictures live on the chain, not in a file. Asking a token what it looks like recomputes the decay from the source, one pass per generation, and writes the image inside the call: palette, frames, timing and all. Every picture on this page came out of that renderer. Nothing was drawn, exported or retouched afterwards.

The iteration is the point. Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting in a Room (1969) records a voice, plays it back into the same room and records again, until the speech has dissolved into the resonant frequencies of the space. A filter that adds noise in proportion to a number produces noise. Lucier produced a room. Here the room is the chain of ownership.

The consent is equally deliberate. When Rauschenberg asked de Kooning for a drawing in order to erase it, de Kooning, knowing exactly what would happen to it, chose a hard one in ink and crayon. XCOPY’s CC0 is that consent, given in advance, to everyone, in writing.

No admin. No renderer setter, no pause, no migration, no way to un-decay a token or mint a replacement root. The only privileged act is the constructor, and you can check that by reading the deployed code rather than this page.

Where it stands

The work itself is built, tested, and driven to the end of its ladder on a local chain. It has not yet met a public one, and the reason is not the code: every source has to be confirmed as one of XCOPY’s solo works, and the moral-rights question deserves an opinion, before anything becomes permanent. That has been the position since 2026-08-02. None of the eight is for sale and none of them is minted.

One thing is on chain. The statement, the text on this page in its permanent form, is inscribed on a single token: 4,910 bytes in an Ethereum event log, which will outlive this page and the repository behind it. Its picture is the decay, all sixteen states in sequence.

That token’s picture is on IPFS, and it is left there deliberately. A work about what survives being copied, whose own statement depends on somebody continuing to pin a file, is demonstrating the thing it names. The argument survives because it is small enough to keep. The picture survives only while someone is paying attention, which is the condition of nearly every work in this market and the reason the licence matters more than the storage. When the eight ship, they will hold their pictures in contract storage and that contradiction closes.

There is a second one, and it does not close. The picture on that token loops, and the work it describes is explicit that nothing recovers. Both are true at once. A copy dies and the work does not, because under CC0 it can always be made again from the source. The decay is irreversible for whoever is holding that token and completely without consequence for the thing itself. That gap is the whole difference between owning a work and the work existing, and it is what the licence creates.

The write-up lives with the source rather than on this page, and the source is not public, so there is no link here pretending otherwise. What is worth saying out loud is that two versions of this were wrong in ways nothing caught: one quietly deleted the hot pink glasses from the most famous work in the set, because it chose the palette by how much of each colour there was and the glasses are a tiny fraction of the canvas. The other could not be deployed at all, because the sources rode in the constructor and eight of them exceed the limit on how large a transaction’s init code may be. Both passed every test.

LATTICE, the studio’s other engine →

The licence is the material. The transfer is the wound. The saver goes free.