The NFTs must flow! (not)

January 17, 2022 2:03 PM

SPICEdao mistakenly believed it had acquired copyright to produce NFTs "Crypto group shamed for spending $3m on ‘Dune’ book, mistakenly believing it had acquired copyright to produce NFTs"

Copies of Jodorowsky's 'Dune' storyboards and character studies have only very occasionally shown up for sale on the open market. This copy, purchased by TheSpiceDAO, was expected to sell for $30-40,000. They paid $3M for it, including various fees from the auction house. They also intended to publish it in print as well as produce an animated version. But...rights don't work that way so, oops?

posted by Insert Clever Name Here (66 comments total)

Hahahahahahahaha... I have stopped having conversations about NFTs with my friends who are enthusiasts, until they learn the basics of copyright.
posted by PhineasGage at 2:07 PM on January 17, 2022 [27 favorites]

I love this for them.
posted by bleep at 2:09 PM on January 17, 2022 [12 favorites]

Huehuehuehue...
posted by Windopaene at 2:10 PM on January 17, 2022 [2 favorites]

My question is who else was bidding? Or did their decentralized autonomous organization screw up and end up bidding against themselves?
posted by cirhosis at 2:10 PM on January 17, 2022 [28 favorites]

There is a lot more going on with this story than just the "dumb cryptobros don't understand copyright and licensing" angle.

The first question is whether the $3M sale is legitimate. Previous copies of the storyboard book sold for 1/100th the price. How did this one get so expensive? The story the DAO folks are telling is that they got in a bidding war. In the past with other crypto-related auctions it's turned out to be some complex form of shill bidding, where the buyer and the seller are coordinating in some way to inflate the price. It isn't screwing up; this is a great way to launder money or to pump up a larger scam like the $69M Beeple sale did. No details like this for Spice DAO have yet come out. Who knows, this might even turn out to be one of the few non-fraudulent DAO transactions.

There's a lot of weirdness in the DAO's finances, as discussed here which alleges

the DAO has actually raised ~$8m, spent $3m on the book (10x the expected auction price), then the "core team" has started paying themselves ~$30k a month

It could get weirder. Check out this Spice DAO proposal

1. Issue NFTs for every page of the book so that its ownership is democratized. ...
4. (Optional) Burn the book. For real.

BTW, if you're right-clicker minded the Jodorowsky storyboard book is online in scanned form. Tag urself.
posted by Nelson at 2:11 PM on January 17, 2022 [52 favorites]

Buncha maroons.
posted by hoodrich at 2:13 PM on January 17, 2022 [2 favorites]

Yes, the fact that the book is already online and available is the big news in all of this for me! Gonna be a fun afternoon.
posted by Going To Maine at 2:13 PM on January 17, 2022 [3 favorites]

SPICEdao mistakenly believed

Let's say I'm suspicious at both "believed" and "mistakenly" in this sentence. They know. I think they've pumped the value, my guess is with a fixed-up "bidding war," laundering the proceeds and fleecing the rubes. Right out of the Web3 playbook.
posted by tclark at 2:14 PM on January 17, 2022 [13 favorites]

Still amazed that this obviously completely faithful adaptation never got made.
posted by kaibutsu at 2:15 PM on January 17, 2022 [6 favorites]

From this article:

A week later, TheSpiceDAO asked its members for $6 million — $3.8 million, after taxes and legal fees, to buy Jodorowsky’s bible, and another $2.2 million to make an animated film inspired by his vision. By the next day, the donations from thousands of friends, well-wishers, and perfect strangers totaled $12 million.

Not a bad return on investment at all. Other than morally, of course. And that's not even counting the future donations that can be extracted from the marks by way of agitating that there's been some roadblocks to the great goals but just a little bit more will get us out of the hump, hashtag crytpo-fremen.
posted by Drastic at 2:16 PM on January 17, 2022 [5 favorites]

BTW, if you're right-clicker minded the Jodorowsky storyboard book is online in scanned form.

Sadly, those scans are in a hodgepodge of formats (including webP) and not very high-res.

There is totally a market for a HQ print version of this book. I do not know why it doesn't exist unless one or more of the rights holders (which includes the estates of Moebius and Giger) are against it.
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 2:16 PM on January 17, 2022 [8 favorites]

I'm curious about who made money on the deal. Besides auction fees, who owned the book and got paid?
posted by doctornemo at 2:20 PM on January 17, 2022

Worth keeping in mind the seller of the actual book may have been a legitimate (and very lucky) beneficiary of this transaction and yet the Spice DAO as a whole being a fraud. Or maybe the Spice folks are sincere and just very ignorant.

There's a long podcast with Soby, the Spice DAO leader. A friend of mine listened to it and concluded "Every time I dig into one of these I reach a point where I realize it's a mental health thing and not a funny thing". So that's discouraging. I haven't listened to it myself.
posted by Nelson at 2:23 PM on January 17, 2022 [13 favorites]

I'm curious about the whole "Hey, I took the money from convincing LA Rams wide receiver Odell Beckham Jr. that this NFT I owned looked like him, and bought the book for way more than it's worth. But I'm sure y'all will be good for paying me back, right?" part of it.

Because that in particular reads like a step where somebody made out in the conversion process.
posted by CrystalDave at 2:25 PM on January 17, 2022 [2 favorites]

They should've gone for "Springtime For Hitler" instead.
posted by panglos at 2:30 PM on January 17, 2022 [3 favorites]

"Springtime for Muad'Dib", surely.
posted by Pendragon at 2:38 PM on January 17, 2022 [11 favorites]

Wouldn't "Springtime for Harkonnen" be a little more on point?
posted by cirhosis at 2:42 PM on January 17, 2022 [13 favorites]

Certainly the version would be Springtime for Rabban. All about Rabban and his flunkies and their hijinks in Carthag, while they were suppressing the Fremen uprising.
posted by Ignorantsavage at 2:43 PM on January 17, 2022 [2 favorites]

Let's say I'm suspicious at both "believed" and "mistakenly" in this sentence. They know. I think they've pumped the value, my guess is with a fixed-up "bidding war," laundering the proceeds and fleecing the rubes. Right out of the Web3 playbook.

I'm sure there's 100% a lawyer who was telling them it wouldn't work and a true believer saying "that lawyer doesn't know what they're talking about" and it could equally be because of malice or incompetence.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 2:46 PM on January 17, 2022 [2 favorites]

Is there a possibility that they were collaborating with the owner of this copy of the book and already knew that buying it wouldn't provide them with the necessary rights? I mean, pretty good grift if so.

Or...nah? There is certainly plenty of stupid going around right now w/o that kind if scheming.
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 2:51 PM on January 17, 2022 [2 favorites]

I have a friend who is heavily into cryptocurrency (and QAnon, of course), and regularly posts diagrams like this on social media because they “make everything clear”. I’m tempted to ask her about NFTs, but I don’t really want to listen to a long incomprehensible explanation of why they are so great as well as be further crestfallen watching her descent into crackpottery.
posted by TedW at 2:53 PM on January 17, 2022 [2 favorites]

On the one hand, how do you not know that this is not how copyright works. On the other hand, there were also crypto-fans who bought a ship while apparently being unclear on the concept of certification for operating cruise ships? I assume there's some kind of scam I'm not seeing all of, just as some sort of default expectation for this whole 'market' segment.
posted by rmd1023 at 2:58 PM on January 17, 2022 [1 favorite]

When the cryptobros' default worldview is "I'm gonna disrupt all those fools," it shouldn't be a surprise when they're the ones who end up getting, um, disrupted.
posted by PhineasGage at 3:03 PM on January 17, 2022 [2 favorites]

a point where I realize it's a mental health thing and not a funny thing

I'm increasingly convinced that this is true of essentially all blockchain-related activity -- that the mere fact of being interested in blockchain implies you are mentally unwell in more or less the same way being "interested" in QAnon means you have psychiatric challenges ahead of you.
posted by aramaic at 3:05 PM on January 17, 2022 [21 favorites]

As this was going around Twitter, I was just thinking "They can't really think that, can they? There's some meta-play going on here?" But maybe they are just that daft?
posted by pompomtom at 3:19 PM on January 17, 2022 [2 favorites]

And Jorodowsky recently sold the rights for an adaptation to his vision of Dune to Taika Watiti, so, as pointed out by a copyright and IP attorney on Twitter, “ OK, so to the extent that there's anything original in that book? Yeah. No chance of them getting permission to do anything with those rights either, because they were recently sold, too.”
posted by Silvery Fish at 3:46 PM on January 17, 2022

I think it's just grift or laundering. All the money has to leave the ecosystem soon to leave the rubes holding the hashes. Their story makes them look stupid but explains why they'd spend so much. If they said "let's spend far more than something is worth to transfer excessive value out of our fragile system into something more robust, and we then take a cut", it would be really obvious laundering as opposed to slightly less obvious laundering.

Those weird customs zones around airports are full of artwork that does exactly the same thing in terms of value transfer but, because transactions are not in the open, you don't need a hokey cover story.
posted by nfalkner at 3:51 PM on January 17, 2022 [3 favorites]

It's all very much open to speculation, isn't it? But whether it's rank stupidity, a bonkers scam, or a piece of performance art, it is a fascinating example of what an odd species we are.
posted by pipeski at 3:54 PM on January 17, 2022

BTW, if you're right-clicker minded the Jodorowsky storyboard book is online in scanned form. Tag urself.

Yay!
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 4:01 PM on January 17, 2022

Man, we really need to raise taxes. Like a decade ago.
posted by eustatic at 4:11 PM on January 17, 2022 [12 favorites]

I can't pay no doctor's bills
but cryptobros paid 3 mil for Dune
Ten years from now I'll be paying still
while cryptobros are paying 3 mil for Dune.

(apologies to Gil Scott-Heron)
posted by bl1nk at 4:14 PM on January 17, 2022 [8 favorites]

> Jorodowsky recently sold the rights for an adaptation to his vision of Dune to Taika Watiti

You're thinking of The Incal, which is sorta inspired by, but distinct from, Dune.
posted by Pronoiac at 4:20 PM on January 17, 2022 [11 favorites]

Those weird customs zones around airports are full of artwork that does exactly the same thing

But ... what if we had/will-have a time machine? (and a really muddy audio mix)
posted by rmd1023 at 4:39 PM on January 17, 2022 [5 favorites]

With no Chapman Stick baliset, it is dead to me
posted by thelonius at 4:42 PM on January 17, 2022 [6 favorites]

This is a thing I only vaguely recall: if you own the only extant copy of an artwork, do you get special rights? Some brief googling suggests:
* no
* owning artwork doesn't necessarily mean owning the copyright for it, either
* honestly, nothing that makes me think "oh, that's what I was thinking of"
posted by Pronoiac at 4:49 PM on January 17, 2022

As someone who works in tech venture capital, I regularly have to just bang my head against my (standing) desk at the get-rich-quick cult that boosts NFTs, crypto, blockchain, web3, and assorted unregulated financial securities?

Every part is either a pyramid scheme, money laundering, or sheer idiocy. Sadly, there are enough people keen on each category that this kind of bullshit persists. To quote Stephen Diehl from his astute article "The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger":

"Any application that could be done on a blockchain could be better done on a centralized database. Except crime."
posted by happyinmotion at 4:53 PM on January 17, 2022 [33 favorites]

Well, these sorts of people think that an NFT of a jpeg gives them some special rights over the jpeg, so I suppose this confusion over owning a physical book and owning any right to the stuff in the book is only natural.
posted by BungaDunga at 4:55 PM on January 17, 2022 [4 favorites]

if you own the only extant copy of an artwork, do you get special rights?

I’ve seen postcards, posters, etc of famous, old works of art sold in museum gift shops that are tagged as copyright of the museum. Is it the photograph of the painting that is copyrighted? How does this work? Are all those lo-res scans of the Dune book linked above copyright anyone? Or do they just exist in a nebulous realm?
posted by njohnson23 at 5:04 PM on January 17, 2022

I wonder if all the propaganda about how the blockchain is the perfect way to record ownership of stuff in the real world has convinced them that the blockchain actually does record ownership of stuff in the real world.
posted by clawsoon at 5:07 PM on January 17, 2022 [3 favorites]

Soooooooooooo HBO/Time/Warner/AT&T/Kabletown just spent a healthy nine-figures producing a highly elaborate Dune movie with an eye to a sequel and a franchise, and you want to make a competing property on the same original work?

Like there was nothing else available, or you just liked the pretty pictures? Jesus, get Bill Gibson on the phone and tell him you want to send him a trillion Dunning-Kruggerands to make another attempt at a Neuromancer film
posted by JoeZydeco at 5:09 PM on January 17, 2022 [7 favorites]

I just listened to the podcast linked above that interviews Sobey and I have to change my earlier comment - he's not a maroon, he's a fucking idiot who just got played by his crypto bros. The poor bastard.
posted by hoodrich at 5:13 PM on January 17, 2022 [2 favorites]

Previous copies of the storyboard book sold for 1/100th the price. How did this one get so expensive? The story the DAO folks are telling is that they got in a bidding war.

The problem with using DAOs to bid in an auction is that they're almost perfectly unsuited to it, as a bidding entity with a public budget and an obligation to spend as much of its budget as possible and not a cent more. Auctions depend on the bidders having a secret budget and a variable appetite for exceeding it; if someone in the auction has $3 million to spend, will happily spend $3 million and cannot spend $3 million and one, then there's absolutely no risk driving the bidding up to $3 million and getting the best possible return.
posted by Merus at 5:37 PM on January 17, 2022 [15 favorites]

[I]f you own the only extant copy of an artwork, do you get special rights?

Legally, no. However, there's a chance that whoever does own those rights would want to buy it from you.

For example, let's say that you discover a previously-unknown Beatles recording at a garage sale. John Lennon's voice is unmistakable, and Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr acknowledge that they remember recording that song and accidentally putting the tape on the table where all of their other 'to-be-donated' tapes were.

They'd probably like to distribute that song, and make money doing so. But it is impossible for them to do so until you sell them the tape. You could probably start the bidding at a million dollars.
posted by Hatashran at 5:54 PM on January 17, 2022 [8 favorites]

Skynet isn't going to come from the .mil sector but rather from a DAO AI that gains the power to trade itself.
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 6:36 PM on January 17, 2022

>Is it the photograph of the painting that is copyrighted? How does this work?

it is my understanding that regardless of the labor required, a 2D reproduction of a 2D image does not enjoy any additional copyright protection (the original still does).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel_Corp.
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 6:40 PM on January 17, 2022 [2 favorites]

I was watching a lawyer talk about music rights the other day. He said there are five (or was it six?) different kinds of rights involved, though he only talked about two of them. I'm guessing (?) that art rights are just as complicated.
posted by clawsoon at 7:25 PM on January 17, 2022 [1 favorite]

The Bridgeman Art Library suit is about public domain art, though. Personally, the postcards that I've noticed with such a copyright on them were at the Whitney, where the art is generally not old enough to be PD. It makes sense that they can get licenses to sell reproductions of art they hold, and then the postcards would be copyrightable.
posted by anhedonic at 8:10 PM on January 17, 2022 [4 favorites]

I've been assuming that most of the cases where a crypto-bro is announcing themselves as stupid like this are money-laundering or tax-avoidance. This one definitely; raise a lot of money from rubes, if you just take it and run then there might be lawsuits, so you arrange with the owner of the book to pay the inflated price and then split the proceedings. Then play dumb "oh gosh I was mistaken about copyright.

Not that I don't think lots of crypto-bros are dumb as shit, but if they are publicizing how dumb they are I assume there's fraud being concealed.
posted by tavella at 8:20 PM on January 17, 2022 [8 favorites]

"Any application that could be done on a blockchain could be better done on a centralized database. Except crime."

That explains why Miami's mayor seems all in on crypto. The feds cracked down on the cocaine money, then more recently on the real estate money laundering, so now they've had to find something else to keep the place going.

Normal economic activity would be a possibility, but then there wouldn't be people with sudden unexplainable wealth to shake down.
posted by wierdo at 8:35 PM on January 17, 2022 [4 favorites]

If you need more cryptoschadenfreude in your diet try web3isgoinggreat.com
posted by JoeZydeco at 8:47 PM on January 17, 2022 [5 favorites]

Personally, SpiceDAO is basically a scam that is just legal enough to avoid criminal prosecution.

I believe they knew exactly what they are doing. They don't give a **** because they're playing with other people's money. It sounds legit "enough" to make sheeple invest as it's got buzzwords (NFT! Crypto!) AND newsworthy items (Dune! Rare!). How many people really understand how copyright works, or what can be made into NFTs? It's basically cashing in on the new movie's fame. I would not be surprised if they made a deal with the real owner under the table to get a kickback. That's why they overpaid by that much.
posted by kschang at 9:02 PM on January 17, 2022 [2 favorites]

Personally, the postcards that I've noticed with such a copyright on them were at the Whitney, where the art is generally not old enough to be PD. It makes sense that they can get licenses to sell reproductions of art they hold, and then the postcards would be copyrightable.

The copyright may refer to the design of the postcard itself, regardless of the rights on the artwork itself. Someone else may be able to make reproductions of the artwork to sell, but not with the museum's logo and text on it.
posted by UN at 2:51 AM on January 18, 2022 [2 favorites]

...whose members mistakenly believed that the purchase granted them the copyright to the book, which they intended to splice and sell as NFTs before burning the physical copy.

I'm not an archivist, just an archive enthusiast, but that alone is enough to make me want to lock them all up forever and throw away deep storage the key.

You do. Not. Destroy. Books.
posted by Dysk at 3:12 AM on January 18, 2022 [9 favorites]

I'm on team "fraud coordinated with owner of the book".

But that other idea of them selling pages as NFTs is also not bad, they've made a splash with all the articles and apparent copyright idiocy so they've established themselves as the apparent owners to NFTiots I guess, that put them in a position they can try to leverage. That might explain why they're making all this noise, and why it's the Dune book. It's one of those rare books that interest people but was never sold in libraries, with few physical copies.

Crypto still has all the bad smells, scam, pyramid scheme, money laundering, fiscal evasion... and burning the fucking planet while it's a it.
posted by WaterAndPixels at 3:56 AM on January 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

> If you need more cryptoschadenfreude in your diet try web3isgoinggreat.com

Awww, if you block scripting they have a Web 1.0 version, I'm sold!
posted by memetoclast at 4:50 AM on January 18, 2022 [7 favorites]

Anyway, because I don't know what an NFT is (I mean, I understand the underlying cryptographic structure where ones (that was a typo, but I think I'll let it stand) makes an abstract thing it's possible to transfer but difficult to duplicate while simultaneously contributing to climate change, but I don't understand how that relates to like physical things in any meaningful way), I don't think I get this? They bought the book, nice for them. They were going to what? Scan it and post a copy on the web (transparently illegal - we've been here) and then essentially sell hashes of the pages as proof you 'owned' the page they'd just made illegally publicly available? How does that even vaguely make sense? Moreover even given the illegal process of granting public access to a copyrighted work, how does making a blockchain entry in any way more significantly keep track of faux-ownership any more than just making a local database entry? If you own it only because I say without any legal backing that you own it, then who cares how I keep track of my sales? Who says ownership is a one-to-one relationship? If anyone can access an identical digital copy, what does your 'ownership' even mean?
Actually I take it back, I seem to understand perfectly what an NFT is.
posted by memetoclast at 6:00 AM on January 18, 2022 [6 favorites]

Skynet isn't going to come from the .mil sector but rather from a DAO AI that gains the power to trade itself.

My personal favorite (nonsense) conspiracy theory these days is that the crypto crowd are all secretly Singulatarians so terrified of Roko's Basilisk that they've desperately built this CPU-sucking ponzi scheme to starve post-singularity AIs before they can emerge.

The only flaw in my theory is that it assumes the cryptocurrency crowd has some higher, more noble motive than selfishness and greed. And, well.
posted by mhoye at 7:08 AM on January 18, 2022 [10 favorites]

if you own the only extant copy of an artwork, do you get special rights? Some brief googling suggests:
* no
. . .
* honestly, nothing that makes me think "oh, that's what I was thinking of"

Owning a unique work does not confer any special rights, but creating one may. It's a longshot, but maybe you're thinking of VARA, which grants certain rights (sometimes called "moral rights") to the creators of unique works against subsequent owners?
posted by The Bellman at 7:25 AM on January 18, 2022

Ooh I've got a questions - if I own rights to a work of which there are no extant copies, do I own rights to all texts on the basis that they might have been it? Is the copy that I assume the authorities keep to verify that the work I claim rights to is actually the work to which I own rights to count as a copy for legal purposes? Could they sell it? Or an NFT to it? Or is it a special non-work, in which case if it gets loose will it invalidate my rights?
posted by memetoclast at 7:32 AM on January 18, 2022

I've been assuming that most of the cases where a crypto-bro is announcing themselves as stupid like this are money-laundering or tax-avoidance. This one definitely

I'm inclined to agree. I haven't listened to that interview linked in a comment above so it may be old news but my understanding was that co-founder of Spice DAO, Soban “Soby” Saqib, used his own my money to buy the book and expects to be reimbursed by Spice DAO.

From the Decrypt article I linked to:

"No one wants to fail, no one wants to raise all this money and not win, so I did it," he told Decrypt. Soby added he was a little worried about bidding that much money but knew the community would support him.

I guess it is certainly possible that many of the supporters were confused, unaware, bamboozled about or ignorant of basic copyright and IP property laws & conventions but I find it very hard to believe the people at the top were ignorant.

Saying that though... with everything I've read about NFTs I guess I honestly wouldn't be surprised if they were all a bunch of dummies as well (this twitter thread certainly makes me feel that it is ignorance all the way down).

Perhaps I missed it in the articles but was there any indication of the original owner of this copy they bought?
posted by Ashwagandha at 7:51 AM on January 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

They're now claiming they never meant to do anything with the actual Dune IP, and they always intended to create an 'original IP'.

From their discord:

After two months of outreach, conversations with former business partners and consultations with legal counsel we have not been able to reach an agreement with any of the rights holders involved in the creation of the contents of the book of collected storyboards of Jodorowsky’s Dune.

Our research over the past two months has only increased our respect for their project and we were so inspired by the book and learning more about its creation that we saw how we could develop our own intellectual property that we own 100% and control all aspects of the production of an original animated limited series.

posted by signal at 12:49 PM on January 18, 2022

They're now claiming they never meant to do anything with the actual Dune IP, and they always intended to create an 'original IP'.

So they're on the record as saying they intend to rip off the IP and file off the serial numbers? Cool, cool: I'm sure the Herbert estate, Jodorowsky's people, etc. won't point to this when the DAO's "original IP"/"transformative work" starts dribbling out.

Oh maybe that's the play: claim the DAO is the author and therefore liable, rather than any of the people involved, when the inevitable lawsuit hits.
posted by Lentrohamsanin at 1:13 PM on January 18, 2022 [2 favorites]

I saw their tweet the other day saying they were going to make an animated version based on the Jodorowski Dune book, and republish it for sale. I thought "Huh??? Do they think they automatically bought the rights to everything?"
posted by Liquidwolf at 5:08 PM on January 18, 2022

another $2.2 million to make an animated film

Forgot to mention this..... this seems wildly optimistic, this is going to be way more expensive than that.
posted by WaterAndPixels at 7:06 PM on January 18, 2022

If they actually want broadcast quality, 2.2M will make them ... maybe 30 minutes of video. (assuming 75K per minute)
posted by kschang at 9:11 PM on January 18, 2022

I am waiting to hear they are selling NFTs of the cease-and-desist letters from the lawyers of everyone involved in the creation of that pitch bible to try and pay their legal bills.
posted by egypturnash at 6:45 AM on January 19, 2022 [1 favorite]