[PragmaticPulp]

NFTs don’t sell ownership. They sell NFTs.

It’s like creating a contract that sells the contract itself. Then maybe you stamp a photo of Michael Jordan on the cover and call it a Michael Jordan contract, even though the contract doesn’t give the buyer any rights to anything Michael Jordan related, except the contract itself.

Then you can go out and make more Michael Jordan contracts, because there’s nothing in the first contract stopping you from making more.

So yes, actual ownership must be done with real physical contracts still if you want to enforce things in the real world. NFTs can only enforce things within the NFT itself, which is useless for real-world ownership.

[ddeyar]

The contract would give the buyer rights to use the content. When I'm the owner of a physical Picasso then I have the right to sell t-shirts with the motive on it. If someone else would do that, I could sue him. The same idea is behind this NFT hype, you buy the right to use the content. As far as I understand it.

[Pyrodogg]

It's theoretically possible that the contract could be structured in such a way that "The bearer of this token has rights X, Y, Z over this real or intellectual property", but that's definitely not what is being hyped right now.

More commonly, people are just buying an authenticated digital asset which confers no rights over the source material.

For example, An artist could sell unsigned instances of their digital art as .JPG files, and they could sell authenticated copies as NFT.

In both cases, you get a copy of the art. In neither case are you getting an implicit copyright to the work that would allow you to redistribute the work.

[PragmaticPulp]

NFTs don't transfer real-world rights. They only transfer the NFT itself.

You could potentially create a real-world contract that ties ownership of the real-world asset to whoever holds the NFT, but that would introduce real-world legal issues like voiding the NFT in the event that it was transferred fraudulently and so on.

It seems a lot of people have been misled into believing that NFTs are something they're not. NFTs are like a special URL that points to some other content. You can trade that URL, but the content being pointed to still exists separately.

[ddeyar]

Thanks for this conversation. It is truly very misleading. There is no implicit copyright. There are mentions about ownership and also contradictions. This generalization I made, was wrong.

[TomSwirly]

I want to comment you on your very good attitude here.

(And yes, it's just baffling that people pay for these NFTs when they really get nothing out of them.)

[Bjartr]

I think the picasso analogy is flawed. Works by picasso prior to about 1926 are in the public domain, works afterwards are still under copyright. There's nothing about the sale of an original piece that inherently transfers copyright, it depends on the terms of the transfer.

You can buy original animation cells from Disney movies, but try to resell that image commercially and you're probably gonna have a bad time.

AFAICT, NFTs are orthagonal to copyright. But it gets confusing because at least some sellers of NFTs are purposely trying to mislead, by omission if nothing else.