That's like saying "but there's no reason for any of this to be websites." You could theoretically do this without NFTs, but no one has and NFTs already have to

That's like saying "but there's no reason for any of this to be websites." You could theoretically do this without NFTs, but no one has and NFTs already have tons of traction. You have to store the database of who owns what digitally somewhere, on-chain is just more durable and composable. Implementing as NFTs makes the data platform-independent. And it's easy to assign licenses to the NFT (and therefore the holder of the NFT), you literally just say "the holder of this NFT owns copyright for this image... etc". Tons of NFT collections implement this! =)