Blockchain is not a grammar for intellectual property rights.
You literally need to create a grammar for that, and an application layer, which is not part nor parcel to the blockchain architecture.
Nor should it be.
You should be able to make an assertion of rights, and then provide proof of those rights, based on multiple computing paradigms, whether from a SQL or NoSQL database, or embedded within a computer file itself, or so on.
There's a whole body of work in my life associated with this idea, and no, blockchain doesn't automagically solve for many or any of the problems I saw looming back in the 1990s:
NFT's are pretty dumb IMO. But I think there is something interesting in this question.
What's the Constitution? It is a piece of paper with ink on it. The paper and ink aren't that valuable, actually I have many better pieces of paper and some better ink. So that isn't where the real value is.
I could also buy a modern copy of the Constitution which would be, practically, much better than the original (in the sense that it would be made of modern materials and more durable as a result), so the value must not be there either.
I guess it could be in the investment value of the Constitution. I mean, I bet if I had the Constitution and held onto it for a couple decades, I could sell it to some collector for more that I bought it for. But that's not really a satisfying answer -- clearly the investment value is derived from some other underlying belief that the thing is important.
Anyway, if I was really good at writing I could string you along indefinitely and keep cutting away aspects of the Constitution that clearly don't provide the value, but I'm just a programmer so let's get to the point: I think the value of the Constitution is actually completely divorced from the physical thing itself. It comes from the history that it represents -- which is actually an intangible idea.
So, if someone were to mint an NFT of the Constitution and we decided that it also represented that idea, I guess it would be just as valuable? Good luck convincing other people! But I don't really see why the physical piece of paper is fundamentally a better representation of the idea, other than that's just the way we've always done it. Maybe you can mint an NFT of the Constitution for yourself, and convince yourself it represents the idea better than the piece of paper did. I think this would be a pretty silly thing to do, but no more so than trying to own the paper representation.
These are all just ways of satisfying our irrational desire to own part of an idea, the problem comes from our belief that ideas are ownable, not the shape of the token.
If Alice makes a Constitution NFT, and Bob makes a Constitution NFT, which NFT is the legitimate one? I'm not sure how using "Blockchain" to track the trust issue helps at all.
If you say "The first one to file the NFT wins" (lets ignore the fact that this only works if both Alice and Bob are using the same blockchain with the same concept of time), then what if Bob files the NFT but doesn't in fact, have ownership of the Constitution? What if Alice is the true owner, but heard about NFTs later and thus does the filing process after Bob?
What if Benjamin Franklin had gotten blackouot drunk at the constitution writing after party, knocked the original and the early copies into a pile together, and just plucked one out of the stack at random? Not super relevant I just think it is a funny hypothetical. I'd say the secretly older copy doesn't have some extra significance, the 'real' Constitution is whichever one we've been displaying this whole time, I think, but there's definitely room for disagreement.
Unless Alice or Bob are minting an NFT which they claim is redeemable for the Constitution, which isn't how these things generally work I think, either of their copies has some argument for representing the Constitution. In any case these are all just mementos that represent the idea of the history of the Constitution, as is the real one, as is Ben Franklin's switcharoo copy, as would be your own privately minted copy. I think it is impossible to meaningfully get it right.
Provenance is a thing, so no. You're just some rando and nobody would care about your NFT.
The same way you can buy or even make replicas of nearly any artwork out there. The one blessed by the creator has value that the illegitimate copies do not.
No it isn't. The claim was "provenance matters". Your claim, "but NFTs of stolen art exist" is non-responsive. Stolen art isn't the norm, it's the exception, IRL and on-chain, it's not honest to imply otherwise, and you know better than that.
I don't see how that's a straw horse. It's even mentioned in the blog post as the "Enforcement problem".
Nobody can (or should) take NFTs for Real-Life goods seriously until this problem is solved for good.
I myself doubt it can be solved properly without a centralised authority which would contradict the whole "trustless" selling point. But I'd be glad to hear approaches how this and the Oracle problem could be solved in a trustless manner.
There are serious projects using distributed ledger technology that are trying to solve for "this distributed ledger entry stands for this real-world container of goods" or "this particular pallet," or "this particular box on that pallet, or "this particular diamond in that box" or "this particular fish."
But the application-level definition of parsing and comprehending what an entry in a ledger stands for is not universal. These are proprietary, or at least, communally-held paradigms being set up independently by each ledger designer.
We're lacking universal grammars so that the logic of an item designed to operate on distributed ledger X would be recognized or honored if migrated to distributed ledger Y.
NFTs only assure ownership of the NFT data itself, not what the data may represents off of the chain or otherwise. The only people who think/claim that you now own a PNG or a lease by storing a link to one in a blockchain are idiots or people trying to sell things to idiots.
Assuring ownership of the data itself in a decentralized way has value outside of this current fake / grifted meme of owning a random PNG. It's tiring that a community that seemingly prides itself on technical understanding gets so hung up on an overused fake use case.
Or even digital goods because you still need to know for any digital good which chain or chains has legitimate versions and really which those are versus any copies that are also on the chain(s).
I am genuinely interested in how this problem is solved.
I actually own around 200 frames of a certain movie (bought them from the production company as a way to help sponsor the movie) and I would like to put them up for sale as NFT's, but I dont really see how everyone else could just claim the ownership and do the same.
You literally need to create a grammar for that, and an application layer, which is not part nor parcel to the blockchain architecture.
Nor should it be.
You should be able to make an assertion of rights, and then provide proof of those rights, based on multiple computing paradigms, whether from a SQL or NoSQL database, or embedded within a computer file itself, or so on.
There's a whole body of work in my life associated with this idea, and no, blockchain doesn't automagically solve for many or any of the problems I saw looming back in the 1990s:
https://patents.google.com/?inventor=Peter+P.+Corless