> an NFT is an abstract handle to which various rights can optionally be attached.

What I find confusing is the following:

Rights are meaningless without enforcement (in the real world). Who is going to enforce NFTs? There's no government or other authority standing behind this tech.

Compare NFTs with patents/digital rights - in both cases I "own" the artwork in some sense, but digital rights/patents, there are entire mechanisms that ensure these rights can be enforced.

With NFT, I can just ignore them without any issue.

My question is: how are NFT rights enforced?

You make a license that ties rights to the NFT, and use the legal system. E.g. a license that says "whoever holds this NFT gets the right to display the artwork it's for", if you want to sort-of match the sale of a traditional artwork.

In other words, its a digital certificate of ownership/rights that has no enforcement mechanism and still requires a contract, a lawyer, a court, and a society that enforces rights laws to run.

NFTs are actually speculation scams being run on the uninformed using buzzwords like blockchain and crypto while themselves being worthless. A digital certificate of authenticity for an infinitely reproducible good which still requires major cost and legal intervention to enforce.

A highly corrupt speculation scam using buzzwords about blockchain.

But which legal system?

I’m almost tempted to setup-shop ‘stealing’ NFTs and displaying them in a gallery, I imagine if I set everything up off shore to the US that I will risk pretty little

Anyone does DMCA etc even apply here? Even if it does, I can just host in a country that ignores it…

Just as you can with anything else copyrighted. Why would that be any different? NFTs just are a different way of tracking who has them, noting more.

Luckily there is nothing to enforce absent parties contractually tying rights to NFT holders. And at that point you just have a contract, enforced by the courts.

> My question is: how are NFT rights enforced?

Charlie and his older brother will work in the new compliance department where they search Youtube and Dailymotion every day and flag CBMF duplicate uploads.

My understanding is that buying an NFT is essentially buying the right to control a cell in a spreadsheet (the "shared ledger"). If you buy the NFT, you are buying the right to have your name in the "owner" column of a line in the spreadsheet that corresponds to a particular media identifier, at least until you transfer that right to someone else.

Absent further agreement by the parties, buying the line in the spreadsheet doesn't mean anything. You don't actually own or control anything other than having your name in that cell of the spreadsheet, next to an identifier (e.g. a URL) that identifies a piece of media.

There could be a thousand lines in the spreadsheet tied to the same piece of media. I.e., the original author of a piece of media can sell as many cells in the spreadsheet as he or she wants.

Owning an NFT -- meaning controlling the cell in the spreadsheet -- does not mean that you own the copyright or even that you have a license to display or copy the work unless the copyright holder chooses to tie those rights to whoever is in the cell in the spreadsheet. It just means that you control that cell for the time being.

I haven't seen the terms for this particular NFT sale, but there is no reason that they needed to remove it from YouTube unless they decided they wanted that to be part of the transaction.

But considering how trivially easy it is to just reupload the video, unless they plan to play copyright wack a mole, it will never actually be deleted.

I downloaded a copy the other day. We named our daughter Charlie, and when she's old enough we want her to understand why all the older people she meets think it's hilarious to say her name with a British accent.

> an NFT is an abstract handle to which various rights can optionally be attached

When there are no rights attached, I think of NFTs as a fancy system of provenance.