> Admittedly, the copyright situation is a bit less clear though.

Well, according to Wikipedia, an NFT is a piece of data which acts as a proof of ownership, (essentially like a deed from a notary public) "that is separate from copyright".

As for copyright, that's clearly about exclusive rights of authorization (per the Berne convention) which are protected on the part of the original creator. In this case, the original creator was the Davies-Carr family who first made the home video and uploaded it to YT.

https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-57227290

The difference between analog art and digital art is "uniqueness". That is, there's one physical original copy of the Mona lisa handcrafted by Leonardo Da Vinci, and it hangs in the Louvre. Sure, there are millions of printed copies of the image on the canvas, but the true value of that particular copy is that it's the first rendition of the image of the Mona Lisa in the physical world. The closest you can get to that in the digital world would be the storage medium that contains the original file as it was first created (I suppose that would be the home recorder of the Davies-Carr family).

So, NFT, in this regard, is about establishing "ownership" of the original copy. Pretty much like an art collector wants to actually own the original first rendition, as made by the artist.

What wasn't sold here is the copyright. It's the ownership of the particular copy which was uploaded on YouTube.

Barring extending any license of intellectual property to the buyer, the exclusive rights that authorize who gets to make a copy, and publish that copy online,... are still firmly in the hands of the Davies-Carr family.

This is an important distinction since it might bite art collectors: buying a work doesn't automatically imply you also own the copyright to that work. On the contrary.

> Presumably the video will become public domain at some point

Under UK law, that would mean: 70 years after the death of the original creator. Depending on the age of the Davies-Carr family members (and wishing them a long and healthy life), "Charlie bit my finger" won't enter the public domain before 2100.

Copyright in the digital era is massively problematic as most content copied and shared online is almost invariably violating someone's copyright.

Sharing a copy of "Charlie bit my finger" via a torrent isn't violating the rights of the person who ends up being mentioned as "owner" in the NFT. It's essentially violating the rights of the original author which are, presumably, still the Davies-Carr family.

Put more succinctly, the Davies-Carr family could be entirely cool with someone asking them "Hey, I have a copy of your video, okay if I upload it back to YouTube?" and the NFT owner can't do a single thing about it.

So, by now it should be clear what the actual problem with NFT's is.

What you hope to buy is the experience of owning an original piece. In the analog world, this carries quite a lot of different layers of meaning: this pertains to the idea of having the actual canvas, rope, paint,... hanging off your wall; but also the story tied to the particular physical object: it's tribulations as it survived history, the fact that it has an established provenance and you, as owner of the object, becoming an inextricable part of the object's history. You'd buy art not just for the sake of owning, but also because you tie yourself to it's history, and it becomes a vessel that helps you transcend your own mortality (famous art collectors become part of the historic narrative).

As far as NFT's go, that's totally not the case. The buyer of "charlie bit my finger" bought a copy which merely resided on the hard drives of YouTube. Even that copy is arguably original as "Charlie bit my finger" has been with YouTube for years, and probably was copied / transferred many times over between Google's data centers. In the digital world, it's simply impossible to attain the same kind of "value" you'd get from buying an object in the physical, analog world.

... the only reason why someone was willing enough to pay $760k for this NFT is because they genuinely believe it's equivalent in value compared to buying on the analogue art market.