There's a lot to unpack, and I don't have time to write a book but I do want to add a few cents.
As an artist, I'm aware of copyright laws and how they work, but the reality is in the real world, for individual artists such as myself it's largely useless. If you infringe on the copyright of Disney, say your prayers, but if you infringe on the copyright of a typical working artist, it's not something you can pursue in a practical way. Of course the law is there, I'm just saying in practice it tends to be useless.
Blockchains are stateless and copyright laws are local, so it's kind of pointless anyway. What if someone in China buy's my art? What's the copyright law there? Anywhere else in the world? Again, you could lose yourself in minutia of legalities that at the end of the day just don't fit with this new technology, or you can participate and use some common sense. If someone buys your art, it's theirs. Do you think I'd commit artistic suicide and go after someone that bought my art if they posted it somewhere?
If you bought the Mona Lisa, but didn't take it out of the museum, what would you have? Probably something like a certificate of ownership. If you sold it, you wouldn't need to physically move it, you just sell the certificate. Similar thing w NFT's. People are focusing on the actual digital file and can't really wrap their brains around owning the "artwork". The image lives on some server somewhere, and at least on Makersplace you can download the full res file, but that's not really the point. When the artist mints a token and puts it on the bc, they're signing over the ownership in the context of that ecosystem to the buyer. How does that translate into the non-blockchain world? At this point, it doesn't, and that's fine.
Buy stuff that you want, don't spend more than you can afford to lose, nothing is a sure thing, etc, etc.
BTW, all of that does NOT equal that at the end of the day what you concluded is not true. There will be legal friction and a shake up as disruptive tech gets introduced into an established system.
It's not just about legality it's about an agreement between the creator and the buyer. Anyone can break the rules of the game and people do all the time but we are dealing in areas of trust... and you're right there is little way to give any of this teeth.
We trust the artist will stay true to the game and not simply create more and more tokens of the same image after saying there would only be X editions.
We trust the buyer to do a few things... and sadly it's hard to enforce either except to point out a breaking of the rules of the game
Yea pretty much, but I think this is going to be something heavily reputation based on the artist side and collector side, so each side is incentivised to behave. Of course there WILL be out and out scam artists out there, but NFT's are not immune to human nature. New tech = new scams. Same happened with the internet.
Agreed