If I buy a license of a game, I gain the legal ability to play the game.
If I buy a print of and associated license to art, I gain the legal ability to look at and resell my copy the art.
If I invest and buy the copyright to something, I can sell the above rights to others.
If I pay to record on a blockchain my ownership a hash, I gain...nothing. I guess I could brag about how I paid money for a hexadecimal string when no one else was willing to? The theoretical advantage is that I can try to pawn it off on someone else for more money by convincing him that he can do the same to someone else.
NFTs are not a copy of the art. On a technical level, they're hashes of the item for which you're paying to store on the blockchain. You can't get the original work from a hash, only verify the accuracy if you already have both. Then on a legal level, you do not give you any legal right to even view the art. The artist isn't signing you a license to copy the work, and, as described, a hash is not a copy for which such a license could be implied.
If you buy just an NFT and send the US registered artwork itself along with it to the buyer, that's copyright infringement, and the original artist could sue you for thousands of dollars.
If the art is digital how and the artist agrees that editions of the NFT represent a copy of the art how is an edition of the NFT not a copy of the art?
Because it's factually not. You can't get the art from the hash. It's one-way. That's the whole point, to create artificial scarcity and non-fungibility.
Since it's not actually a copy, there's no first sale doctrine license to the copyright, making it illegal to have a copy of the art unless you have a separate licensing agreement. And if you do have such an agreement, that's the thing giving practical value.
You and I can agree that a rock represents your car, but I'm still not going to pay you for it.
There is in practice no first sale doctrine for digital images; the first sale doctrine gives you the right to distribute your copy, not to make your own copies; and you can't transfer a PNG to your friend without making a copy. The first sale doctrine deals with the intersection of copyright with physical copies of a work.
This is why no one is buying and selling digital artworks, except using an artificial concept of ownership - a certificate. The artworld has done it with paper certificates for a long time; NFTs are the same thing.
> This is why no one is buying and selling digital artworks, except using an artificial concept of ownership - a certificate.
You seem confused. A certificate does not grant ownership. The reason nobody is buying and selling digital images is because producing an exact copy of a digital image costs nothing, which means it's irrational to pay for a copy of an image since you can make a copy yourself for free.
Because a "copy of the art" is a work of art that is the same as the original art and an NFT is not a work or art and is not the same as the original art. An NFT is a virtual token, than may or may not contain some metadata. This is not the same thing as the original art. Therefore it is not a copy of the art.
If I buy a print of and associated license to art, I gain the legal ability to look at and resell my copy the art.
If I invest and buy the copyright to something, I can sell the above rights to others.
If I pay to record on a blockchain my ownership a hash, I gain...nothing. I guess I could brag about how I paid money for a hexadecimal string when no one else was willing to? The theoretical advantage is that I can try to pawn it off on someone else for more money by convincing him that he can do the same to someone else.