A lot of NFT discourse involves people who understand neither intellectual property nor regular property arguing about whether or not it’s good to reimplement both without any kind of enforcement mechanism. I work in IP and let me tell you: property is fucked.
Intellectual property is fucked in several very specific ways, because it has never been about some kind of transcendent metaphysical right to get money in perpetuity for your mindchildren but about incentive engineering, and incentive engineering is hard even if you’re skilled.
The ostensible point of copyright is the closest to this metaphysical version of property that normies believe in, but it’s extremely limited: you can only copyright substantial works, and only those actual works are subject to protection. You can’t copyright an idea, for instance. You can’t copyright your OC but can copyright a specific drawing of your OC. You can’t copyright facts (actually, facts are not subject to any form of IP). You can’t copyright a word or phrase, but you can copyright a poem.
That said, we have to recognize that copyright was originally established in order to make government censorship easier. Copyright (along with government control of the presses) added friction to the process — ubiquitous after the invention of the printing press — of constantly compiling and modifying other people’s pamphlets and fliers, much of which was politically or religiously dangerous. Later on, this idea of “moral right” got grafted on, and…
