I presume those who support NFT's (I'm not among them) would suggest that owners would use the legal process in some cases to set a precedent for enforcing rights so that people end up respecting those rights. Like parking tickets for private parking lots, the incentive would be just pay to avoid the hassle if you want to use the asset legitimately. I think the odds of this "pay to display" business model coming together are low but if they did it could be a big financial opportunity for those who hold the rights to valuable content.

Contracts are a PITA! If you can write one, once, probably based on a completely standard template and then never talk to a lawyer, sign a transfer of ownership, worry about where that ownership info is stored and updating the information when it changes, etc. because the initial contract deferred all that to the owner of the NFT which can be bought and sold with a couple of clicks, I’d call that a massive improvement! Even if a contract is still needed somewhere, the friction is gone.

You can't escape the contracts though.

What happens in that initial sale? The owner declares that whoever possesses the NFT owns the good? Under laws like the first sale doctrine, they can't prevent the subsequent owner passing the legal ownership seperate to the NFT so ownership of the NFT still means nothing legally.

Well how about they take a leaf out of the software industry book, and instead of selling you ownership of the thing the NFT represents, they sell you a transferrable non-revocable exclusive license that requires in its terms that transfers of the license and transfers of the NFT happen in tandem. Well now the future buyers _are_ dealing with contracts.

I agree you can't escape having some contracts but I think the NFT supporters would say that the NFT functions like the deed to a property.

A problem NFT appears to be an attempt to solve is all the parasitic people, organizations and rules that govern the transfer of assets. These lawyers, title clerks, law firms, title companies, auction houses and governments extract significant rent from asset transfer marketplaces. This rent is a cost to market participants but the larger cost is limiting the liquidity and size of the overall market.

Like imagine if the title to a car was an NFT instead of a piece of paper. I think NFT might just be a complete scam but it might have utility in disintermediating markets.

Right. If the issue is that you don't trust a government enough to allow them to track ownership via updating the copyright registration, then relying on them to help enforce your digital scarcity.

In reality the only digital scarcity that NFTs directly create is the scaricty of the token itself. Which is fine, and could potentially be used for interesting purposes. One problem is that they pretty much always require off-blockchain knowledge of which contract is the correct one for the purpose.

The other problem is that most plausible useful purposes I've seen discussed (like tracking "ownership" of digital items in a video game) could work just fine as a centralized database.

I've yet to see a proposed practical use (not "art") of NFTs where all participants are sufficently mutually distrustful that a central database cannot be used. There may well exist such uses, and those might be worth getting excited about.

As for the "art", well digital money laundering schemes just don't cut it for me. Like literally: selling some shitty tokens and buying it using other accounts you own, is a great way to provide an explanation for crypto you acquired from some illegal trade or whatever. If anybody asks where you got the crypto from, you can point to your NFTs, and explain that you are just as shocked as everybody else at how much people are willing to buy this stuff for.

Ease of entry, transferability, etc.