To the extent that the courts recognize that possession of the NFT key represents sole ownership of or license to the copyright. Assuming for the sake of argum

To the extent that the courts recognize that possession of the NFT key represents sole ownership of or license to the copyright. Assuming for the sake of argument the simplest case: * It is not in dispute that Alice created a digital work * It is not in dispute that Alice owned the full copyright at the time of creation * It is not in dispute that Alice only sold/licensed the copyright once * It is not in dispute that said one time happened in the same transaction that the corresponding NFT was transferred, nor that Alice and the recipient intended for the NFT to represent ownership. * The NFT is transferd on-chain several additional times. Most of these assumptions can easily become the central area of a copyright dispute. However, even assuming these assumptions are accurate, there are more problems: * Suppose that at some point in time Bob owned the NFT. Charlie claims that Bob either licenced the work to him, or sold him all rights, however the NFT was not transfered. Since Bob owned the copyright, doing so was within his rights. The NFT subsequently gets transferred multiple times, which has no effect on what rights Charlie has. The current owner of the NFT sues Charlie for copyright infringement for using the NFT. * Suppose that at some point in time Bob owned the NFT. It is subsequently transferred several more times. Bob claims that he never sold it, and said transfers are the result of a hack. To work around these issues, you cannot sell the copyright to the NFT owner, but must license it under fairly restrictive terms, such as: * All rights under this license are provided exclusivly to any entity that demonstrates current ownership of the NFT, and are revoke when such an entity loses the ability to do so. * Any rights holder under this license may not grant rights to others [0] * The original copyright holder revokes all further rights from themselves. Additionally, you need this license to track the work (not difficult, many digital works ship with a license nowadays). Further, you need the courts to recognize the terms of the license as valid and interpret them the way you intended. [0] Any desired ability to grant rights could still be encoded into the NFT system, in which case the license should clarify that