This mostly relates to ownership rights and intellectual property rights.

A lot of NFT investors seem to think that they have exclusive rights to the artwork being used, they can use "their" artwork commercially, etc.

If you bought an artwork NFT, not only do you not have any ownership rights to that art, but you didn't buy any art at all.

An NFT can convey ownership, sure -- that's a use case, but it's not an integral feature. Just because you bought an NFT of a real-world painting doesn't mean you own the painting, and the same goes for digital art as well.

Where's the Art?

Artwork in NFTs is stored in three ways:

• The image file is on the Ethereum blockchain
• The image file is on the NFT's native blockchain
• The image file is stored on a centralized server with a URL in the NFT linking out to that server

In none of the above examples are you buying art.

----You're buying a token containing or linking to an image file, and that's the asset.

You can prove that you're the owner of that file, and the creator of the art has agreed that this file, and your token, represent the art itself.

That's all well and good -- you can support local artists, build a collection for the sake of having collectibles, etc. Obviously a major motivation here is in speculative gains, and the artwork is secondary, and that's also fine as long as people understand what they're buying

Who Owns the Art?

When you trade artwork NFTs, you're not trading digital art. You're trading a token that an artist has agreed represents their art. It's similar to the idea of buying a print copy of a painting -- you bought something like a copy of the artwork, albeit an intangible one in this case. You don't own the artwork, you own the image file, or a URL linking out to the image file.

If you sell someone art for $100, I can't copy/paste your JPG file and use the art for my company, because the file isn't the asset -- the image is the asset, and you own it. However, you don't "own" the artwork in an NFT like that, not even if you paid $1 million for it.