> No. Mere possession of bytes does not prove ownership of a work, as many casual music pirates discovered during the early aughts. The more important question is "do I even own the artwork being right-clicked to begin with?" If you bought an NFT, you probably don't.
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> There is no trustless way to prove ownership. If push comes to shove, you will need to appear in a court of law and identify each person on the chain of custody. So you can trust it as must as you trust each individual participant.
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The point, which
- many artists who have had their work stolen and minted without their permission have already realized,
- many owners who found out that NFTs can get scammed away from them have already realized,
- many users who are now grappling with platform decisions about what sales to allow have already realized,
- many owners who are trying to navigate what exactly they are legally allowed to do with their NFT tokens have already realized,
is that NFTs don't actually get rid of any of the legal problems or systems, and in fact often are completely subservient to those systems. For example, BAYC itself:
> The BAYC license states "You Own the NFT. Each Bored Ape is an NFT ... you own the underlying Bored Ape, the Art, completely." The license then goes on to place any number of restrictions on its use, implying that you don't, in fact, "own" the "underlying Art" at all.
NFTs don't solve the fundamental problem of trust, they only solve the problem of a shared ledger. And it turns out that they don't even solve the problem of trust in that ledger, and the community seems to be pretty split on questions like whether someone who steals an NFT from someone else "owns" it or not.
A lot of the NFT hype about distributed consensus boils down to "the code is law, except for these exceptions when it's not, and except for when the code has a bug, and except for when the real law steps in and threatens to send someone to jail." In short, if the answer to "how do I know an NFT is legitimately issued by the artist who made the artwork" is "community consensus/law", then the blockchain isn't actually solving the problem of ownership, the community/law is.
"That's My Ape" offers transparent, user-facing reliance on a system that everyone in the NFT space is already relying on anyway.
