No.

What you're buying is a non fungible token on a specific contract. This contact may link to an external resource for the image. It should be IPFS but some contracts link to a specific IPFS gateway. Either way [with IPFS] the link contains a cryptography secure ID of the image. Sometimes the contract just links to a private website.

The owner of the NFT does not own the image and certainly not its copyright. They own a number inside a specific "smart" contract.

The copyright owner can also legally make another NFT for the same image set. In fact I think anyone can because the links to the images on IPFS aren't copyrightable. Although [regular] contracts and defamation law might mess with that. Although they can't then change the original smart contract outside its logic.

So, I get what you mean. Think about it more like this. Gold is expensive, right? People want gold because it's valuable. But what if gold was way more inconvenient to move around. Like if it was way bigger. That's not desirable. You want it to be valuable, but not expensive to manage. (Security aside, because obviously you want to protect your valuable things. But even if gold was inconvenient to work with and you had a lot you'd still want security.)

Cryptocurrency Blockchains give the miners rewards for working, but there are also transaction fees. The miners get that too. If the amount of data you're storing in the Blockchain is bigger, then the fee would be bigger. Which isn't good.

I hope that clears it up lol, I don't know if I made sense.

Yeah that's the dominant perspective, and the way I see it. The core devs seem to have the perspective that if they don't allow storage of arbitrary data, they'll only encourage the abuse of other transaction parameters to work around it, or encourage anticompetitive side channels where users pay miners directly to include their zany data. And that by opening the floodgates, they allow market competition to decide how much that data is actually worth.

The blockspace has not exploded to capacity with OP_RETURN data in the past week, so the whole controversy could just end up being what politicians these days call a "nothingburger", without even the demand to reveal who was right now that the NFT craze has mostly ended. And if that's the case, the core devs technically made the right choice. We'll see.

Oh yea you'd be trying to store essentially a whole image hosting site, it'd be absurd and only data centers would do it. In the case of bitcoin the block size limit is roughly 4MB and they rarely if ever hit that. Whole chain going back to 2009 is less than 800GB.

Pruned copy would indeed be safe, it omits OP_RETURN data completely.

The NFT doesn’t hold the rights to the image (...)

Yes, that's what I said.

They're saying the opposite of that. The image creator could theoretically do so for copyright infringement if they were so inclined, as they retain the rights to the image. The NFT owner owns the Token embedded in the image. The image itself it not what is being traded when NFTs are traded, the ownership rights to the token associated with the image are being traded.

so you’re saying that an NFT owner could sue someone who right click saves a jpeg by claiming copyright infringement?

No, because they don't hold any rights towards the image. They have the rights to the token proving "ownership" of the image.

Think of it this way: many museums and galleries have art that doesn't belong to them, but rather to private parties. These owners have documents proving they own the piece of art, but you can, at any time, go to such a museum/gallery and snap a photograph of the art. Or even buy a professional replica.

NFT is the document proving ownership.

From my understanding, and it's likely I'm remembering it wrong, the whole idea was "you just check the ledger for the first NFT that points to that URL to know who's the real owner", which would make the others useless.