> if they sold a digital art piece in traditional terms People do sell licenses to digital art, yes. I've both bought and sold such licenses, primarily on Turb

> if they sold a digital art piece in traditional terms People do sell licenses to digital art, yes. I've both bought and sold such licenses, primarily on TurboSquid (https://www.turbosquid.com/ https://www.turbosquid.com/), a digital market place which has been doing that for over 20 years. That's neither a trading card nor the art itself, but it's certainly closer to "art" than "trading card", because I get specific legal rights to do specific things with the art, such as use it and reproduce it in a book, website, computer game, etc. It is worth, I think, asking what is being offered by NFTs that TurboSquid (and it's endless competitors and equivalents for other media types) don't offer. Scarcity? Nothing stops such marketplaces from selling exclusive licenses, and some have tried, although I don't think it's ever been popular. > the legal meaning of an NFT is less defined, true, but I suspect people will tie licensing contracts into that soon enough Well, yes. People might start selling some sort of "NFT + rights" package at some point, but they don't come with any now, hence the "trading card" digs. Even if people start adding rights in the future, it's not clear that these rights will be (or will be seen to be) an integral part of the NFT. If I can sell an NFT of my 3D model now, and I can sell the right to use my 3D model in a game now, why would I combine these in a package and not just keep selling them independently? (Now, one interesting thing is that the rights attached to NFTs would presumably be transferable, while licenses to digital art are currently overwhelmingly non-transferable. That is a big change. But...we could sell transferable licenses now; you don't need NFTs for that, and the concept is currently not popular. I rather think that rather than NFTs true value being that they enable transferable licenses, the transferability of licences attached to NFTs will be a drawback.) > Especially in art, a lot of this comes ultimately down to social convention That is true. Art prints are an interesting example; you're basically paying for 1) the right to reproduce an artwork on a single piece of physical media and 2) paying for the artist to do that reproduction for you. Both are legitimate services, but it's odd to find them packaged together like that so frequently. And yet, art prints are a huge and very well accepted part of the art market. If NFTs become widely accepted, they will seem less strange, to be sure.