>...but ownership of property requires physical and/or legal protections, which they do not.
This is not true for digital property. Digital property is just as "made up" as the NFT that proves its ownership. People hear "NFT" and for some inexplicable reason jump to physical art.
If the network believes, by whatever consensus methods for proof of ownership that are employed by this network, that you own one coin then those same methods can be used so that the network can believe that you own a certain digital asset. That ownership is just as real as the ownership of a coin.
What people get confused with is the concept of copying or using (both are actually the same problem) this asset. But, this is not an NFT problem, it is a digital problem. All digital assets have this problem, if you give me the asset I can copy and use it without your consent.
Example: I can trivially copy the entire Netflix catalogue on my hard-drive. Since those bits land on my system to be shown on a screen they can just as easily land on my HD as an mp4 file. Are we on any disagreement that Netflix owns those shows? No. But once made available to me, I can use them however I want. Ownership and "use" are to unrelated things when it comes to digital.
Why would anyone care about digital ownership? The only reason anyone cares about bitcoin is you can translate it in to physical ownership of things later.
Digital ownership is enforced by the code that’s interpreting the data, so the app publisher is the organization responsible for enforcing property rights. Tokens signed by an app-trusted key solve the problem with almost zero resource cost.
Digital ownership is enforced by laws and nothing else. There is no amount of code that can technically prevent me from copying any data that lands on my system.
>Tokens signed by an app-trusted key solve the problem with almost zero resource cost.
This ensures safety against access and not against copying. Of course I can not copy assets I don't have access to but the same is true for NFTs.
I’m not aware of any legal protections available to the person holding the private key that last signed an NFT. Digital property rights are enforced by client apps / DRM as well as legal trade agreements, but legal enforcement will be based on traditional registrations and won’t cover on-chain NFT transactions. You can buy my house’s NFT, but I will still legally own my house. Since, as you point out, DRM can always be broken, there is effectively no enforcement of NFT property rights at all.
Please refer back to my original comment about people hearing NFTs and for some reason which I fail to understand jump to "physical property". NFTs do not work for physical property but they do for digital.
Enforcement of digital rights is actually easier via NFTs than contracts/client apps etc. because NFTs mathematically can prove ownership (courts just have not caught up yet).
This is not true for digital property. Digital property is just as "made up" as the NFT that proves its ownership. People hear "NFT" and for some inexplicable reason jump to physical art.
If the network believes, by whatever consensus methods for proof of ownership that are employed by this network, that you own one coin then those same methods can be used so that the network can believe that you own a certain digital asset. That ownership is just as real as the ownership of a coin.
What people get confused with is the concept of copying or using (both are actually the same problem) this asset. But, this is not an NFT problem, it is a digital problem. All digital assets have this problem, if you give me the asset I can copy and use it without your consent.
Example: I can trivially copy the entire Netflix catalogue on my hard-drive. Since those bits land on my system to be shown on a screen they can just as easily land on my HD as an mp4 file. Are we on any disagreement that Netflix owns those shows? No. But once made available to me, I can use them however I want. Ownership and "use" are to unrelated things when it comes to digital.