If you buy a Babe Ruth baseball card you aren't buying the rights to Babe Ruth. It's the card itself which is valuable, as a product of the context it was issued in. I don't know why that part, as it translates to NFTs, is so difficult for people to understand.
You have the right to copy of that Babe Ruth baseball card and place it on a t-shirt. If someone uses that exact card's image to do this, you can sue them for copyright infringement.
What? Surely not. Someone else still owns the copyright of baseball cards, don't they? Or are baseball cards special in that they come with a kind of copyright ownership when they're sold? I doubt that.
They’re valuable to collectors as there is a finite supply of them. There is literally an infinite supply of NFTs, and the works they are a pointer to can be cloned digitally. There is no comparison.
There is a finite supply of a given NFT and infinite cards can be printed by someone else, you just only care for those minted by a particular authority in either case.
