If the Louvre decided to sell an NFT of the Mona Lisa, nothing prevents them from generating another NFT (or a few thousand) of it as well. Same thing for an NFT pointing to an image at some URL and containing a hash of that image, it doesn't actually generate ownership of that art in any legally meaningful (or enforceable) way.

Digital ownership only works for things that 100% stay in the digital realm, and even then it's not a guarantee.

From what I read so far, NFT "ownership" works about the same way as those certificates from the 60s that attest ownership of a plot on the moon.

It's "ownership" of something without granting you any of the perks or rights that usually come with that.

It's not even exclusive ownership - because, while you have exclusive control over your particular token, there is nothing that keeps some other entity from minting another token and declare that it symbolises ownership of the same asset that is symbolized by your own token.

I think NFTs do have some interesting properties. The ownership of the token itself is indeed exclusive - this is enforced through the blockchain. Moreover, token ownership can be verified by software, without any human involvement. This could enable some moderately interesting use-cases, like resellable digital assets: You could imagine an online game where each character is bound to an NFT. You can sell the character by selling the NFT - and the game can restrict access to the character to the current owner of the NFT.

But this doesn't seem to be what's actually done: Instead, NFTs are simply declared to symbolise "ownership" of some real-world asset, without having any kind of actual connection to that asset.

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I bequeath to you digital ownership of this string. Let's imagine hn is an immutable forum. It represents a block of gold. What are you going to do with it?

Define digital ownership.