There are lots of similarities with the early discourse around torrenting sites and links I think. A common argument back then, was that torrenting sites were just like Google, they only contained links to files and had thus were not violating any copyright laws.

If I mint an NFT that just points to some artwork hosted on IPFS have I infringed on the copyright of said artwork? My NFT only contains URLs, not the artwork, after all.

Twitter seemed to have thought of this for their pfp implementation, they have the user upload the image rather than pulling it from the URL referenced in the NFT which puts the copyright violation onus on the user, not Twitter. It was pretty amusing when Twitter released their NFT integration and people started complaining that they weren't verifying the legitimacy of the NFT collections. Of course, the notion of a "legitimate collection" implies the existence of some centralised authority to distinguish between the real BACY and a copy.

> If I mint an NFT that just points to some artwork hosted on IPFS have I infringed on the copyright of said artwork? My NFT only contains URLs, not the artwork, after all.

I think the better question is: would you willing to host the sale of those NFTs and possibly liable to millions if a future court case finds you have infringed them.

Someone like OpenSea would be hosting the sales, no? In fact the creator of the contract could remain anonymous.

It’s also not clear at all which law in which jurisdiction this would be a violation of. It’s akin to a web link, which aren’t illegal anywhere AFAIK.

But by taking money in exchange for a transaction that persists on a blockchain that separates OpenSea from, say, Pirate Bay. It was free to create an account and upload a torrent file and then the sharing occurred off-platform. But since OpenSea operates in the same way as any web 2.0 platform — providing an API that interacts with the thing that does the hosting/sharing — it's more liable to things like copywrite infringement.

I think the analogy with the Pirate Bay actually holds up pretty well. In the end bidding on Open Sea results in a contract method being called on the blockchain which transfers the actual ownership.

Sure, just like the music/film industry targetted Pirate Bay as a central place for sharing torrent files, the same thing can happen with OpenSea.

The more important point I'm making is that the fact that anyone can deploy their own EIP-721 contract means that there has to be central agreement about which is the legitimate version of an NFT. I find this to be an amusing property for a, supposedly, decentralised system.

Conceptually, this is already correct. The NFT represents the abstract thing, not any particular set of files or url.

The Cryptopunks only contain a hash of the file. The link is just a utility so wallets can display something w/o having to support each NFT individually.