If you buy a Babe Ruth baseball card you aren't buying the rights to Babe Ruth. It's the card itself which is valuable, as a product of the context it was issued in. I don't know why that part, as it translates to NFTs, is so difficult for people to understand.

You have the right to copy of that Babe Ruth baseball card and place it on a t-shirt. If someone uses that exact card's image to do this, you can sue them for copyright infringement.

With NFT this cannot be done.

The only thing copyrightable on that card is the photo, and you don't own the rights to it, the photographer/issuing company does.

What? Surely not. Someone else still owns the copyright of baseball cards, don't they? Or are baseball cards special in that they come with a kind of copyright ownership when they're sold? I doubt that.

Because I can look at the baseball card. I can display the card as well.

If you want to print out an NFT display that, go ahead but it's pretty meaningless.

A Babe Ruth card is pretty meaningless, too. It's hardly great to look at but you can derive pleasure from knowing you own it for some reason.

They’re valuable to collectors as there is a finite supply of them. There is literally an infinite supply of NFTs, and the works they are a pointer to can be cloned digitally. There is no comparison.

There is a finite supply of a given NFT and infinite cards can be printed by someone else, you just only care for those minted by a particular authority in either case.

You don't need to own the card to do that. Just google image search and look at your screen. If you like cardboard cards, print one on cardboard.

It gets worse: if someone hard-forks the blockchain the NFT is on, it's possible for there to be two entirely different claimants to the NFT.

And then there's all the times people's artwork has been straight up ripped off and minted into NFT's without their permission. The only provenance record a blockchain can authoritatively track is its own internal transactions -- it can't even prove that the original artist was involved at all; you're still relying on trust for that.

If you bought let's say a signed physical print of the piece of art you can't do that either. Even if you own an original painting you can't do that unless you explicitly got granted permission. So why expect it from NFTs?

Because when I buy a piece of art, I can hang it on my wall and look at it.

If I buy an NFT, it doesn't give me the right to print a picture of the art and hang it on the wall. I have no rights to display the picture of which I own the NFT. All I can say is that I own the NFT of that piece of art.

So, I can hang the hex code of the NFT on my wall and look at that I suppose. But the actual piece of artwork that is associated with that NFT? I can't even display it on a digital display in my house, because that's copyright violation.

You talked about selling prints above...

Many NFT platforms attach legal terms that explicitly allow you to print or otherwise display the media for NFTs you own, artists generally grant permission for it or consider it a social convention that it is allowed.

Some artists will also make archival prints to sign and send to provable owners, like the Fidenzas.

Lots of traditional art is used for flexing or money laundering. NFTs work just fine for those applications.

This isn't true, it depends entirely on the project and the rights assigned. Meebits and Bored Apes give commercial rights up to 100k USD/yr (a formal agreement is required if exceeded), and Cryptoadz grant fully open CC0 rights to the owners to use in any purpose. - Also, when in the past few decades have you ever bought a piece of art from a creator and assumed that would give you commercial rights to their creation?

NFT license are dependent on the project. That's up to you to research. NFT license from crypto kitties allow you up to 100k. BAYC has full commercial rights.

You wrap the token into the new standard if there is a new one when there is a new standard. Look at cryptopunks, they are wrapped into ERC-721.

It makes total sense to me if you think about money laundering for illegal transactions.