No, they just think publishers only deserve to get paid for copies, not licenses.
In the Old Days we had a legal doctrine of copyright exhaustion, whereby once a copyright holder had made a copy and sold it, they had to point to some further act of copying in order to claim infringement. This meant that copyright owners got paid and the public, generally, didn't have to worry about copyright any further.
Then the computers and Internet came. Devices whose only interaction with information is to copy it. Publishers realized that they could defraud the public of their First Sale rights in two steps:
1. Get the courts to believe that every interaction between a computer and a copyrighted work is infringement[0]
2. Stick "licensed-and-not-sold" language on everything they possibly could
There is a direct through-line between the time when copyright was an obscure regulation on publishing houses to today's "you will own nothing and be happy" rhetoric. NFTs are just another manifestation of that: they purport to emulate physical property by letting us sell and resell dangling pointers to a work, as some kind of exercise in mixing the harms of DRM[1] and financialization into one particularly toxic soup. That's why the games industry jumped on them so damned quickly, and why the textbook publishers want in on that next.
[0] See MAI Systems Corp v. Peak Computer, a 9th Circuit ruling so nutty that it argues that dynamic RAM is a fixed medium and any software that isn't execute-in-place cannot be run without a licensing agreement
[1] Yes I know NFTs do not have DRM in and of themselves, "right click, save as" is a meme. Getting DRM into the system is phase two.
In the Old Days we had a legal doctrine of copyright exhaustion, whereby once a copyright holder had made a copy and sold it, they had to point to some further act of copying in order to claim infringement. This meant that copyright owners got paid and the public, generally, didn't have to worry about copyright any further.
Then the computers and Internet came. Devices whose only interaction with information is to copy it. Publishers realized that they could defraud the public of their First Sale rights in two steps:
1. Get the courts to believe that every interaction between a computer and a copyrighted work is infringement[0]
2. Stick "licensed-and-not-sold" language on everything they possibly could
There is a direct through-line between the time when copyright was an obscure regulation on publishing houses to today's "you will own nothing and be happy" rhetoric. NFTs are just another manifestation of that: they purport to emulate physical property by letting us sell and resell dangling pointers to a work, as some kind of exercise in mixing the harms of DRM[1] and financialization into one particularly toxic soup. That's why the games industry jumped on them so damned quickly, and why the textbook publishers want in on that next.
[0] See MAI Systems Corp v. Peak Computer, a 9th Circuit ruling so nutty that it argues that dynamic RAM is a fixed medium and any software that isn't execute-in-place cannot be run without a licensing agreement
[1] Yes I know NFTs do not have DRM in and of themselves, "right click, save as" is a meme. Getting DRM into the system is phase two.