The same way you verify if a deed is authentic: asking an appointed “Oracle”. In this case, sites like OpenSea act as verifiers. Who tells you the Louis Vuitton bag you’re buying is authentic? Do you ask the shopkeeper? How do you know they’re not selling you a copy?

If you opened a bar in Tampa and called it the same as someone else named theirs, and stole their branding, you’d be exposed to the same copyright laws one would in Florida, with or without NFTs involved. That’s a completely orthogonal issue, NFTs aren’t a mechanism for copyright enforcement, they’re just a ledger that’s easier to verify because it’s public and distributed.

I don't think OpenSea can vouch anything for things outside their ledger, and even in there they can only check the timestamps, which cannot tell anything about proof of real-life ownership (where those copyright laws work). So the ledger can vouch for my timestamp in this ledger as long everybody trusts only this ledger and not this other ledger. So while I agree NFTs are not meant to enforce copyright, I think also they don't go much in the direction of proving it either as long you still need some real-world oracle like the artist themselves or such. You can just check the artist website at this point, it can be more trustworthy than a timestamp in a ledger and just as open.

OpenSea verifies ownership off-chain, they "verify" projects, prevent fake Bored Apes from proliferating, etc. Same sort of "proof" you'd expect on any digital property, from Twitter's identity verification to Spotify's. You're overcycling on something about "timestamps in a ledger" that's not really relevant to what we're talking here.

> You can just check the artist website at this point, it can be more trustworthy than a timestamp in a ledger and just as open.

How do you know the artist's website you're visiting is the actual artist? How do you decide which of the many sites is The Real One? By asking the artist? How do you know if they're the right owners? What if I open a site and claim I'm the artist, and sell a copy of their content?

So NFTs are something which makes sense only because of the rules which are not intrinsic - off-chain verification, off-chain trust, off-chain property laws... thank you for taking your time to explain to me. (ps: I'm not ironic)