First, apologies for the wall of text. I did try to make it short, but it’s a multi-step complex subject.
What you wrote about possession and ownership makes sense in the physical world, were there can be only be one person who has possession of something - I give you the seashell I have in my possession and it’s now in your possession and not in my possession anymore.
In the digital world, on the other hand, there can be infinite people in possession of exactly the same works because it can be copied at no cost.
This is why we end up with the headfuck which is Copyright Legislation and terms like “ownership” and “licensing” having very specifical legal meanings: whilst possession in the physical domain is unique and stupidly simple to determine (though, as you correctly pointed out, less so “ownership”), in the non-physical domain if you want to preserve that unique possession (or at least limit the number of people having possession) you end up with the anti-natura construct which is Intelectual Property Legislation.
Now, NFTs are a two step mechanism for asserting possession - they’re not the asset itself but rather a token which itself is possessed and whose possession gives rights over an underlying asset.
The problem of unique possession of the NFT itself is techically solved by NFTs. However NFTs have no mechanism whatsoever to enforce any rights on the underlying asset - that part is delegated to other, non-technical mechanisms, which for underlying assets which are non-physical goods, invariably means Copyright Legislation and Contract Law as those are the only ways to control rights over infinitelly-copiable things (well, there’s DRM, but NFTs don’t do that).
As you pointed out NFTs, as a standardized token representing possession, deliver various practical benefits, which I would say are similar to those that Stocks deliver as tokens representing part-ownership of a business.
However:
For Stocks there are a lot of legally mandated business ownership rights linked to Companies Limited By Shares (or whatever is the local legal name were you live for those companies were ownership is determined by owning shares of the company) which define most of the rights that possession of Stocks give (with even tighter rules for market traded companies)
For NFTs there are no guaranteed legal rights on the underlying asset associated with having them: the rights on the underlying asset of an owner of an NFT start and stop with what’s in the Contract and those contracts aren’t even standardized.
The problem is that all together the NFT architecture is not standardized because that second link of the chain - the Contract linking the NFT to the underlying non-physical asset - is non-standardized hence you don’t really know what you get if you buy a random NFT without reading the Contract for that specific NFT.
None of this is a problem if all you want is a cheap license to use a copyrighted work and in the process help the artist by paying them directly without paying middlemen (which seems to be your use case).
This is a problem for those who think they can just buy an NFT as a reselable investment asset, since the real value of an NFT is down to the nitty gritty details of the Contract associated with that NFT and whether one can actually enforce that Contract. It’s this part that anchors all the scams around NFTs.
That said, the idea of using NFTs as a technological base for markets to make it simple and easy for consumers to buy works such as music directly from artists in a world were there is Copyright Legislation has merit, it’s just as an investment that NFTs are problematic.
First, apologies for the wall of text. I did try to make it short, but it’s a multi-step complex subject.
What you wrote about possession and ownership makes sense in the physical world, were there can be only be one person who has possession of something - I give you the seashell I have in my possession and it’s now in your possession and not in my possession anymore.
In the digital world, on the other hand, there can be infinite people in possession of exactly the same works because it can be copied at no cost.
This is why we end up with the headfuck which is Copyright Legislation and terms like “ownership” and “licensing” having very specifical legal meanings: whilst possession in the physical domain is unique and stupidly simple to determine (though, as you correctly pointed out, less so “ownership”), in the non-physical domain if you want to preserve that unique possession (or at least limit the number of people having possession) you end up with the anti-natura construct which is Intelectual Property Legislation.
Now, NFTs are a two step mechanism for asserting possession - they’re not the asset itself but rather a token which itself is possessed and whose possession gives rights over an underlying asset.
The problem of unique possession of the NFT itself is techically solved by NFTs. However NFTs have no mechanism whatsoever to enforce any rights on the underlying asset - that part is delegated to other, non-technical mechanisms, which for underlying assets which are non-physical goods, invariably means Copyright Legislation and Contract Law as those are the only ways to control rights over infinitelly-copiable things (well, there’s DRM, but NFTs don’t do that).
As you pointed out NFTs, as a standardized token representing possession, deliver various practical benefits, which I would say are similar to those that Stocks deliver as tokens representing part-ownership of a business.
However:
The problem is that all together the NFT architecture is not standardized because that second link of the chain - the Contract linking the NFT to the underlying non-physical asset - is non-standardized hence you don’t really know what you get if you buy a random NFT without reading the Contract for that specific NFT.
None of this is a problem if all you want is a cheap license to use a copyrighted work and in the process help the artist by paying them directly without paying middlemen (which seems to be your use case).
This is a problem for those who think they can just buy an NFT as a reselable investment asset, since the real value of an NFT is down to the nitty gritty details of the Contract associated with that NFT and whether one can actually enforce that Contract. It’s this part that anchors all the scams around NFTs.
That said, the idea of using NFTs as a technological base for markets to make it simple and easy for consumers to buy works such as music directly from artists in a world were there is Copyright Legislation has merit, it’s just as an investment that NFTs are problematic.