[ceejayoz]

> Yeah, but the ones who have their ownership verified on the blockchain are the owners.

Not legally, they aren't. I can take someone else's photo, put it up on OpenSea as a NFT, and it'll go through. I didn't own it. You don't own it. The original photographer still holds every bit of legal ownership, regardless of our possession of JPEG copies of it.

[rattlesnakedave]

Sure. That’s not even close to the common case though. That’s a stretch edge case.

[dpark]

Is it not? If you buy an ugly ape, does the creator actually transfer copyright? If not, you literally don’t own anything more than a piece of metadata. You don’t own the url (because the person who owns the domain does). You don’t own the jpeg (because that’s a nonsense notion). You don’t own the copyright. You literally just own a bit of metadata that references a url.

[ceejayoz]

It's a clear example of why "I possess the private key for a NFT" does not infer ownership of the NFT's contents.

[SAI_Peregrinus]

It's happened though, people have made NFTs of the art of various unaffiliated artists. It might not be the most common case, but it certainly happens.