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Comment by azemetre | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, when I realized you don't actually "own" it through any licenses it made me sour on the whole idea.

Is there a reason why people couldn't be granted a license to do whatever they wanted with an NFT? Seems kind of arbitrary to do so, but I'm sure there's a reason why it's like that.

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Because anyone can mint an NFT, whether they have a license or not, so it would require a bureaucracy to check the validity of the NFTs, and so on, in other words a central authority. And if the system relies on a central authority then it makes no sense to trade the licenses on a blockchain, as the blockchain only adds an unnecessary step. Skip the blockchain and go directly to the central authority.

Buying a physical painting doesn’t give you any licenses to the artwork itself either. Just because you buy a modern painting at auction for $30 million doesn’t give you rights to start printing T-shirts of the art.

Yes it does. You own the art. (?)

For that price, you're getting all the rights to it in perpetuity.

That is incorrect. You own the physical piece of art, not the copyright to the art. if I own an original sketch by Charles Shultz of Charlie Brown, that doesn’t give me any rights to the character of Charlie Brown. If an author gives me a handwritten, first draft manuscript of a new novel, I may be able to sell that physical manuscript but it doesn’t give me any rights to the work itself.

You own your BAYC for instance. Man it's like talking to my grandma in here.

I believe all NFTs should be in public domain, in the same spirit as open-source.

recent NFT projects like Nouns[1] and many others have taken this approach!

[1] https://nouns.wtf

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