A picture that dies of being sold.
Eight works by XCOPY, re-encoded and 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 transfer puts the work itself through one irreversible pass of generation loss: progressive blur, the palette halving, the extinction of motion. After fifteen exchanges only a flat field is left.
The licence is the material.
On 1 August 2022 XCOPY placed every solo work he had made, and every solo work he would make, into the public domain. Free to use, remix, and build upon, with derivative and collaborative works excluded because those rights were never only his to give. 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 the JPEG instead of buying the token. It minted on SuperRare in December 2018 and first sold for about one ether. 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, and this one does, reduced to what a chain can hold. It could not have been made about any other artist.
The original does not live on the chain.
SuperRare token 1154 is a 4000 by 4000 animation of 11,412 KB, and its storage is IPFS. That is true of nearly every famous work in this market and it is not a complaint: an 11 MB file 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.
These are 8,248 bytes each and sit in contract storage, palette and frames and timing, because they are 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, a full range of colour became sixteen. What survives is genuinely his and is genuinely not all of him.
Two operations, set in opposition.
To save costs nothing and harms nothing. Anyone may copy any token at any time, without owning it, without limit, and the token they copied is not altered.
To sell damages the thing that moves, permanently, and folds the history of that movement into the image. Two copies that reach the same depth by different sequences of hands do not look alike. The damage is path-dependent: not how many times a work was sold, but in what order and to whom. Nobody composes these pictures. Each is a readout of its own ownership.
The market tells one story about itself, in which the right-click is theft and the trade is the sign of health. This inverts it. The saver is harmless. The flipper is the vandal. The contract enforces that rather than a manifesto asserting it.
The pristine state cannot be given.
The root tokens are distributed by hand, and because a gift is a transfer, handing one to somebody ages it. Generation 1 exists only in the artist's hands and ends the moment it is shared. That was a consequence rather than a decision, and it is the truest thing in the work.
Two precedents.
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.
When Robert Rauschenberg asked Willem 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.
What this token is.
The statement, inscribed on-chain so that it does not depend on a website, a repository, or a gallery continuing to exist. The pictures themselves live in a contract of their own, which recomputes each work's decay from its source on every request and writes the image inside the call. There is no administrator, no pause, no migration, and no way to reverse the damage or mint a replacement root.
Not claimed.
This is not an authorised XCOPY work. CC0 grants permission to copy. It grants no permission to imply endorsement, and none is implied.
No claim is made to priority. Works that make transfer meaningful already exist. Sarah Friend's Lifeforms (2021) die if they are not passed to someone else within ninety days. Same mechanism, opposite polarity: there, holding is the sin; here it is the only thing that is not.
The licence is the material. The transfer is the wound. The saver goes free.