I am calling it now: that blockchain royalty system on NFTs? It is only a matter of time before Hollywood makes NFTs interact with DRM. Your movie purchase will be an NFT with hardware-backed chain verification.
Using NFTs or other cryptographic DRM would be hugely beneficial to consumers, but what's the point of helping the consumers? It'll only cut into costs because NFTs require some kind of cryptocoin network to do a bunch of calculations, which is expensive to run and wastes enormous amounts of electricity.
A simple RSA signature could be used to license a file to your computer and some DRM comes pretty close to that. If the industry wanted to give you ownership, they already could've done it before the NFT speculators set up the current hype.
I also think that anything that further solidifies IP enforcement is going to kill the future.
Consider that one of these days, we might progress enough to be able to build something approaching a replicator from Star Trek. The utopian society of the show is built on "too cheap to meter" energy that allows replicators to meet everyone's basic needs (and even fancy whims) for free. But even if we reach a similar level of scientific and technological advancement, we won't be able to realize the utopia part if designs for every replicable goods are owned by a small group of people/companies extracting rent, with technology and law preventing circumvention.
No more having to manage a half dozen plus streaming subscriptions. One company could go out and start building a comprehensive library of NFTs for every film and series.
When you want to watch something you check out the NFT from the library. When you’re done you return it. For very hot items, there may be a waiting list, but you’ll get it eventually. No more being stuck in a content ghetto like with modern streaming services.
[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/k78kay/mila-kunis-stoner-cat...
I'd rather have more ways to restore the First Sale Doctrine for digital goods, rather than debasing it further.
1) Remittance is easily implemented in a smart contract.
2) This aligns long term interests between the project creator and the NFT holder (and one can imagine different incentive structures can be implemented for different projects).
1) Remittances for resale imply that ownership was not fully transferred. The item isn't mine, but is some weird mix of being mine, but still having some link back to the person who made it. This is already a problem with digital goods, where I cannot lend an ebook to a friend in the same way that I would lend a physical book.
2) The long-term interests are already aligned due to the existence of a second-hand market, and do not need additional technological protections. Somebody who buys cars new and sells them after 5 years still cares about the maintenance costs of a 15-year-old car, because those impact the sale price at 5 years.
2a) The siphoning of money from a re-sale discourages a second-hand market. If the original maker of an object absconds with 20% of the re-sale price, that gives me less of an incentive to sell it, rather than just throwing it away. This is both from an economic standpoint, because there's a decreased profit motive, and from an emotional standpoint, because somebody is laying claim to my efforts in securing a resale without having a valid reason to do so.
Consider the positive sum view: the creator is encouraged to do activities (marketing? Community management?) to drive the price of the sold items higher and resold more frequently.
Manufacturers are not to be trusted with a tool that can assert ownership over something that they have previously sold.
NFTs won't work with DRM, because with DRM you need to encrypt the content and then decrypt it to view it. But you cannot put the decryption key in the NFT, because everything on the blockchain is public. If you put the decryption key with the NFT, everyone will have it.
So you will still need some kind of centralized system where you will issue the decryption keys to your viewers, and probably the easiest way to track subscriptions and keys is to use a database like MySQL.
(Btw, I do not like DRM at all)