Spice DAO Bought a Rare Copy of Jodorowsky's 'Dune' for $3 Million. They May Have Misunderstood Copyright Laws, Though (morningbrew.com) 75
The Morning Brew: As Frank Herbert wrote in Dune, "The real universe is always one step beyond logic." Case in point: a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) spent $3 million on a rare copy of a proposed Dune adaptation, allegedly with the misguided idea that owning the book would also grant them the rights to its content.
Some background: In 1974, director Alejandro Jodorowsky printed 20 copies of an exhaustive book that contained the script and concept art for his 14-hour film adaptation of Herbert's Dune. This film was ultimately scrapped, due to its budget, but the book became the stuff of legend. Fast forward to November 2021 and Spice DAO, a blockchain collective, bought a copy of the book at auction for $3 million, around 100x its expected price. On Sunday, the DAO tweeted that they intended to do three things with the book:
1. Make it public
2. Produce an animated series based on it
3. Support community projects
An inspiring plan, with a few major roadblocks: 1) Spice DAO only purchased the book, not the rights to its content, which would be needed to create an animated series. 2) The book is already public, and available to browse on Google Photos.
Some background: In 1974, director Alejandro Jodorowsky printed 20 copies of an exhaustive book that contained the script and concept art for his 14-hour film adaptation of Herbert's Dune. This film was ultimately scrapped, due to its budget, but the book became the stuff of legend. Fast forward to November 2021 and Spice DAO, a blockchain collective, bought a copy of the book at auction for $3 million, around 100x its expected price. On Sunday, the DAO tweeted that they intended to do three things with the book:
1. Make it public
2. Produce an animated series based on it
3. Support community projects
An inspiring plan, with a few major roadblocks: 1) Spice DAO only purchased the book, not the rights to its content, which would be needed to create an animated series. 2) The book is already public, and available to browse on Google Photos.
Fools and their money (Score:2)
Re:Fools and their money (Score:4, Funny)
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In the context of Dune the Fremen might say, "a fool and his water are soon parted."
Or, to give a genuine quote: "It is said in the desert that possession of water in great amount can inflict a man with fatal carelessness."
Who bid $2.9M? (Score:2)
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They were so engrossed in the book they forgot to read the contract. Rename it "Doom".
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Hilarious (Score:2)
This has been one of the funniest things I've read in a while. Even if they choose to be "inspired by" for their series the fact they had to buy this book really weakens their argument that it's not an infringement.
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For real. I'm kinda bummed this story blew up when it did, because i really wanted to see them try make an animated series and get sued to oblivion.
king kong copyrights are an mess! (Score:2)
king kong copyrights are an mess!
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Crazy (Score:5, Funny)
Thinking that owning a copy of the book meant they could reproduce the contents at will would be like if Slashdot thought that reading an article on another site meant they could reproduce the entire article as a "summary". Think how crazy that would be!
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The internet taught me well that copyright only applies to music and film; every website constantly reproduces images and texts with seemingly no legal problems to it.
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What would be even crazier is if Slashdot did it more than once per article.
Solution (Score:5, Funny)
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Even Martin Shkreli is laughing at this.
I DRINK YOUR JPEG! (Score:2)
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Someone would buy it and they could get their money back
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They paid 100x the expected auction price to get it because they thought they were getting the film rights. It'll be hard to find a buyer to go higher than what they paid.
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it takes 2 people bidding to push up an auction though.
Re: Solution (Score:2)
Who wins here? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Thanks to Sunny Bono (Score:4, Interesting)
For starting making copyrights basically eternal.
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If you're going to make snide remarks, get your basic facts straight.
First, "Sonny" not "Sunny".
Second, he didn't start it. The Act is named after him, and was proposed and passed after his death. Sonny Bono was one of twelve sponsors of a previous version of the Act, that did not pass. A basic Wikipedia search will get you this info and more.
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"Sonny Bono was one of twelve sponsors of a previous version of the Act"
So: "Thanks to Sunny Bono For starting making copyrights basically eternal."
Just because you tried to do something evil but failed and others had to come and finish your disgusting job does not mean you don't get credit for your initial shittiness.
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It's Sonny TreeNo
> Sonny Bono was one of twelve sponsors of a previous version of the Act, that did not pass.
One can argue he got the ball rolling, using his celebrity influence to elevate it.
Re: Thanks to Sunny Bono (Score:2)
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Only he had celebrity influence at the time, out of all the bill sponsors.
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For starting making copyrights basically eternal.
Even if copyrights weren't a thing I'm sure these DAOs would just do something else mind-numbingly fucking stupid.
Speculators (Score:2)
The article speculates the buyer misunderstands copyright law.
I'll add my own speculation: It is more likely that a producer of copyrighted materials understands copyright well fairly well, and perhaps knows a billionaire or two who will pay dearly for an original copy of the script when their adaptation comes out.
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LOLOL!!!! What billionaire wants a crypto bros' fanfic? That's all such a script would be, fanfic.
Re: Speculators (Score:2)
LOLOL!!!! What billionaire wants a crypto bros' fanfic?
The kind who made their Billions (at current trading rates) in cryptocoin by selling illegal pornography and drugs.
Re:Speculators (Score:4, Insightful)
This adaptation will never be made. The rights to produce it are already long gone/resold which is why the 1984 and 2021 movies happened.
To make this movie, you would need to secure both the rights to produce a Dune movie (currently licensed by the Herbert estate to Legendary) AND the rights to produce Lodorowsky's vision (he's 92, so would probably end up being some battle between his estate, the estate of Jean Giraud the graphic artist that illustrated this, and whatever major studio conglomerate has inherited the rights to this specific version through bulk consolidation).
Dead scripts and storyboards rarely get revisited, and this one's way too entangled for anyone to waste their time with when another version is already successfully in theaters.
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Or wait 90 years for it to enter public domain (and have a lobbying stranglehold on Congress during the interim to prevent extensions).
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Buying something in 2022 at 100X its value in the hopes that there's a significant payout around 2070 doesn't seem like a particularly good investment strategy.
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but hey that's working out for my bitcoin investment, why in the last month alone... OH SHIIIIT!!!!
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Investment strategy? I'm sure the money was successfully laundered. No investment required.
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I was thinking about that, but you'd probably want to make your transaction a lot less newsworthy if you were money laundering.
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The problem is that this much money changing hands without an objective transfer of value (essential for money laundering) will always attract attention. The defense the money launders have is "prove it". The point is to look like a stupid purchase.
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Which is a lot easier to do once a transaction has been identified. If you're money laundering you don't want to draw attention to your transactions - the whole point is to hide illegitimate transactions in a sea of legitimate ones so you go unnoticed.
Once a real physical asset is in play, it's a lot easier to identify the parties involved and investigate their other financial activities. If your defense is "prove it", you're already too late, the authorities are investigating you.
one brain distributed (Score:3)
A DAO with one brain distributed among all participants.
Re: one brain distributed (Score:2)
NFT (Score:3)
I'll sell them an NFT of the copyright notice. Then they'll own a digital copy of the notice.
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Then they'll own a digital copy of the notice.
Technically they won't, they'll just own a token in the blockchain. However, I do encourage you to go forward with your plan, as it will be hilarious.
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Once they pay for the NFT, they can keep the PNG too. Hell I'll send it to them on a flash drive.
I highly recommend the documentary about (Score:2)
Jodorsky's Dune from 2013. [imdb.com] It's great,
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Well, if you fan the edges of the book really fast, you get an animation of the text. I bet you can't find THAT on your Torrent site! :-)
Re: Images!? (Score:2)
But the fine-print was the size of a (Score:2)
...grain of sand
Re: The Way (Score:1)
DAO = Dumb Ass Organization (Score:2)
If wishes were fishes (Score:2)
We'd all cast nets.
So there were TWO idiotic organizations? (Score:2)
"At auction" implies they were bidding against someone (in order for the price to go that high). Who the heck were they bidding against? Someone else must have also been duped into thinking they were buying rights to something? Someone played this one perfectly.
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A fool with lots of money was saved from being parted from it by a fool with even more money.
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Not all auctions work like Ebay where bids automatically ratchet between you and your competitor until one of you maxes out. Many auctions take fixed bids. Think of the cliched movie scene where someone waltzes in last-second and doubles the highest bid in a big showy display.
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2x is a showy display. 100x is criminally stupid, or just criminal. One of the two.
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Hmm, what does the Blade Runner franchise own? (Score:2)
A hundred years from now can there be made "replicants" that look like Daryl Hannah, Joanna Cassidy, and Sean Young? Presumably they've already sold dolls, so they own something relevant to that proposition.
I've wondered if someone like William Shatner might license the exclusive right to use his appearance and voice, one at a time. So eventually (again a hundred years from now) some entrepreneur on the make would license Shatner's appearance so as to promote their product (trips to the moons of Jupiter?).
L
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In a thread about Dune you should call them gholas
100x its expected price? (Score:2)
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Of course they are. A DAO was created specifically to avoid regulatory scrutiny. You create a shell company. You take it public, and people buy into you and you get money. You use that money to acquire a privately held company. Voila, you now took that company public.
Sure, you have to file some paperwork like a prospectus and such, but a DAO's IPO basically says "
Awesome storyboard (Score:2)
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Yeah, I browsed through the storyboard on google photos too. Pretty cool stuff. I've seen the documentary 'Jodorowsky's Dune', and that included some of the images in the storyboard, but I think this google photos album has some images I've never seen before.
I also skimmed all of the comments on the google photos album. The guy that put this album together, Alberto Gaytan, says clearly and directly that the images do not represent the complete content of the storyboard.
I just want to point out the most of the images you see here where taken from duneinfo.com It was already available.
But I decided to dig deeper and add what ever I could find.
So this is maby like 20% of the book or less based on my research?
Nope its like 10% of what its on the book I think. The book is 800 pages long. I also have images from other things here, Jodo's Journal and some old script.
So, the claim made by the original
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He who controls Spice DAO (Score:2)
Pretty Ignorant :-( (Score:2)
And I just read books, not a lawyer obvously.
It may have been a money donation scam (Score:1)
While most of the attention towards this case has gone towards laughing at the presumed inept interpretation of the significance of the Dune manuscript as a token of Dune copyright ownership, I think that the real story here is that this might been a well planned money donation scam, organized by the book previous owner.
IMHO, a plausible sequence of events could have been as follows: