> You've got to ask marketing to who though? For example supporting BAYC only nets you 10,000 people at the very most after all. Which is less than 1/5 of the peak concurrent users on Second Life.

That's just that one collection, and the BAYC community already spills out into at least one more collection, MAYC, which has 11k owners and people buying in to that for a cheaper price than a BAYC (although I wouldn't be surprised if at least 60% of MAYC holders also hold a BAYC). I'm sure they'll create another collection (or two, or three) in the future as well, adding new users to the community with each one.

Regardless, there's no inherent limit to how restricted an NFT collection has to be. Sandbox has 137k items for example (only 19k owners though, but that could go up in time as more items are created and sold to new people). Town Star has the highest number of owners on OpenSea right now with 38k owners. That's almost 80% of your peak concurrent users on Second Life in your first point. Still might not be high enough yet (or the right project), but something else could come along in the next few years that does get enough owners. There's multiple new projects being released every week right now, by then there will almost certainly be hundreds more projects out there, one of which might break into the mainstream (or nearly so).

> ...So owners of expensive NFTs don't really get the exclusivity they might feel entitled too.

If I'm understanding you correctly, you're referring to the thing with Twitter Blue that people can mint a copy of a picture from a different NFT collection cheaply, and Twitter Blue will still show it as a verified NFT because it doesn't distinguish between official collections or not, just that "it's an NFT that was minted". People can click the PFP and see that it belongs to a fake collection. Or Twitter Blue can be changed so it will display a checkmark for official collections or something over the icon, just like OpenSea does it.

There's fake shit all over the internet. Hell I get emails every day of people pretending to be legit services I use, trying to get me to click their fake links and steal my identity, that looks legit except for the link. It's just something you need to be aware of. And if people aren't? Well that sucks, but what can you really do than educate people. I've had to sit through phishing education online classes every year at every corporation I've worked at.

> And ultimately even if the holder does get a broad IP license they still need to actively defend it for it to mean anything.

But they don't have to actively get permission to make derivative works, which was the main point. And a lot of these being CC0 means they're pretty much effectively public domain anyway, so yeah, there's no copyright to defend.

Copyright doesn't stop people from copying your shit. I say this as someone who has a video game I released, where I kept the copyrights, and have over the years discovered several people clone that video game (including the name half the time) and put it up on various app stores. Even C&D's don't stop people sometimes.

Hell, it's even been used in A.I. classes at least a couple of times, and included in an Adobe Press book without credit. I actually thought those were kind of cool (although it would have been nice to be credited), but they didn't ask for permission ahead of time, I found out after the fact (for the classes I actually had students hunting me down to ask me for help with their assignments). For another example, just look at the hundreds of Wordle clones and derivatives out there already (many posted to this very site). Copyright is a luxury for corporations and people with lawyers in this day and age.