> Seconded. I see no point in "buying" media from stores where my account can be terminated immediately. If I bought an NFT token that encodes the right to use some copyrighted work, this issue doesn't exist.
As usual, you don't need a blockchain to do either of the two things you're talking about. For the copyright case, what matters is that you have a legal authorization which will be recognized by a court. An NFT can do that but so can an email or anything else — and the problem you're trying to avoid is a concern either way because the same people who require terms of use for their content aren't going to reverse course due to magical thinking advised by blockchain salespeople.
The secondary problem of unreliable cloud storage is similarly very expensively not solved by an NFT. Due to the inherent inefficiency of blockchains almost all NFTs point to a URL for the actual payload. If that hosting provider shuts down or restricts access, you have the same problem as you do now. Now, some people will say that IPFS solves this but if you've thought about the problem at all that is only a solution for content which is very popular and released under an open license: someone has to pay for the storage, even the few people willing to provide storage unpaid aren't going to do so for encrypted content which they can't access, and nobody who cares about access restriction is going to put it in a public blockchain anyway since they'd be one key leak away from the content being available without payment.
> As usual, you don't need a blockchain to do either of the two things you're talking about. For the copyright case, what matters is that you have a legal authorization which will be recognized by a court. An NFT can do that but so can an email or anything else
An email or anything else creates legal gray area. What if the email is from 20 years ago and the company that sent you the email doesn't exist any more? Do we know the email was authentic? Emails don't have cryptographic signatures. And even if, maybe their PGP key leaked. With an NFT, even if someone hacks the wallet of a creator and releases fradulent tokens, they are still trackable. The second advantage is the ability to sell the token. In NFTs, this is a builtin first-party feature, similar to your ability to sell DVDs. But how do you sell an email? How do you ensure that people didn't clone give the email to multiple people? If this problem sounds familiar, it is, it's the double spend problem, which various blockchains have found solutions for.
As for the cloud storage, I think it should be separated. NFTs can be set up in multiple ways. I propose to set them up as follows: a) you can prove cryptographically to others that your wallet contains an NFT and b) the legal framework of the NFT gives everyone the permission to give copies of the work to anyone who has given them a proof after a).
This move would create an entirely separate market for obtaining the work you have gotten an ownership title for. The barrier of entry for these services would be low, and some services can specialize for niche content, others can specialize for speedy delivery, etc. As the cost per work is quite low, I'd imagine a quite low price for these services. The most important advantage: one service going bankrupt wouldn't mean the loss of some people's collections. Especially, anyone would be allowed to host the content.
The single key leak issue is non-existent, because each single download is end-to-end encrypted via say TLS, but the download is only offered to accounts which have proven they own an NFT. Similar requirements are on torrenters, they too have to verify cryptographically that someone owns some content before they send it to them with a end to end encrypted ephemeral key. Maybe, for abuse prevention, there needs to be a record of the verification/download in the ledger as well, so that one can find people who lend out their wallets or something.
Can these issues be solved by a government run centralized registry instead? Absolutely, they can. In many countries, the govenrment runs a land registry already. Land registries share in fact many of the advantages of NFTs. The main issue I have though is centralization.
As usual, you don't need a blockchain to do either of the two things you're talking about. For the copyright case, what matters is that you have a legal authorization which will be recognized by a court. An NFT can do that but so can an email or anything else — and the problem you're trying to avoid is a concern either way because the same people who require terms of use for their content aren't going to reverse course due to magical thinking advised by blockchain salespeople.
The secondary problem of unreliable cloud storage is similarly very expensively not solved by an NFT. Due to the inherent inefficiency of blockchains almost all NFTs point to a URL for the actual payload. If that hosting provider shuts down or restricts access, you have the same problem as you do now. Now, some people will say that IPFS solves this but if you've thought about the problem at all that is only a solution for content which is very popular and released under an open license: someone has to pay for the storage, even the few people willing to provide storage unpaid aren't going to do so for encrypted content which they can't access, and nobody who cares about access restriction is going to put it in a public blockchain anyway since they'd be one key leak away from the content being available without payment.