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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

If you buy a Babe Ruth baseball card you aren't buying the rights to Babe Ruth. It's the card itself which is valuable, as a product of the context it was issued in. I don't know why that part, as it translates to NFTs, is so difficult for people to understand.

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You have the right to copy of that Babe Ruth baseball card and place it on a t-shirt. If someone uses that exact card's image to do this, you can sue them for copyright infringement.

With NFT this cannot be done.

What? Surely not. Someone else still owns the copyright of baseball cards, don't they? Or are baseball cards special in that they come with a kind of copyright ownership when they're sold? I doubt that.

The only thing copyrightable on that card is the photo, and you don't own the rights to it, the photographer/issuing company does.

Because I can look at the baseball card. I can display the card as well.

If you want to print out an NFT display that, go ahead but it's pretty meaningless.

A Babe Ruth card is pretty meaningless, too. It's hardly great to look at but you can derive pleasure from knowing you own it for some reason.

They’re valuable to collectors as there is a finite supply of them. There is literally an infinite supply of NFTs, and the works they are a pointer to can be cloned digitally. There is no comparison.

There is a finite supply of a given NFT and infinite cards can be printed by someone else, you just only care for those minted by a particular authority in either case.

You don't need to own the card to do that. Just google image search and look at your screen. If you like cardboard cards, print one on cardboard.

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