* An NFT is just a pointer - could contain a URL, or just a number used by its smart contract.
* The artwork is just pointed to, it's not on the blockchain.
* The URL may or may not exist for any given length of time either. (Even some NFTs that tried to point to IPFS, actually pointed to an IPFS redirector.)
* No other rights - copyright, moral rights, reuse rights, etc - are conveyed without an explicit contractual transfer. Even the Christie's deal says, once you dig through the 33-page sales agreement, that you are just buying the token itself, and not the image pointed to.
Also, you have zero guarantee that the artist had anything to do with that particular NFT - and there's a lot of NFT grifters "minting" other people's art.
The metadata in the NFT can (and in my opinion _should_) point to an ipfs:// style URL. The websites displaying the NFT would have to use some redirector, but the actual token would have a URL that anyone could host (known as "pinning") on the IPFS network.
and now we're seeing the problem that even with that - or if you go look at the redirector URL and go directly to the IPFS link yourself - the artwork is frequently not present anyway.
Remember that IPFS is functionally just BitTorrent with magnet: links. So if nobody's seeding the file ... it's not there any more. And it looks like a pile of literally the sites selling NFTs don't bother seeding the files they've sold, mere weeks later. Thread: https://twitter.com/jonty/status/1372169695277760519
* The artwork is just pointed to, it's not on the blockchain.
* The URL may or may not exist for any given length of time either. (Even some NFTs that tried to point to IPFS, actually pointed to an IPFS redirector.)
* No other rights - copyright, moral rights, reuse rights, etc - are conveyed without an explicit contractual transfer. Even the Christie's deal says, once you dig through the 33-page sales agreement, that you are just buying the token itself, and not the image pointed to.
Also, you have zero guarantee that the artist had anything to do with that particular NFT - and there's a lot of NFT grifters "minting" other people's art.