Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

€2.6M spent for a book at auction, believed they would own the IP

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 398 posts

Re: €2.6M spent for a book at auction, believed they would own the IP

#81

Post by black_puppydog »

digitaltrees wrote: post #45
camjw wrote: post #30

My favorite part of this story is that they 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[0]. Also, how is this "decentralised" when one person owns over 50% of the voting token? [0] https://snapshot.org/#/dunedao.eth/proposal/0x2038fc240d0e85...

For the sake of accuracy, it appears to me that it is $30k per month total for the core team not each. There is a total maximum operating budget of $50k per month including a maximum of $30k for the core team. When the core team has 4. That is about $8k per month each.

8K seems plenty when you can do your "work" from anywhere in the world (and probably have a good reason to not be too easy to find by your scam victims)

Re: €2.6M spent for a book at auction, believed they would own the IP

#82

Post by cstross »

Good grief, they are SO going to get sued if they try to do any of their proposed uses!

(They no more own the rights to "Dune" than you would if you bought a DVD in a second hand shop and decided to start selling copies of it.)

It'd have been a lot cheaper to ignore the NFT nonsense entirely, engage a motion picture rights agency, and pitch direct to Jodorowski and the Herbert estate for permission to use the IP.

Re: €2.6M spent for a book at auction, believed they would own the IP

#85

Post by gilleain »

notRobot wrote: post #80
gilleain wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's pretty insane. Oddly enough - the process in a library for digitising a copy of a book can be fairly destructive, as far as I understood from those doing it (at CUDL). The spine is chopped off, to make it easier to put it into a machine for scanning all the pages. The digital images can (should?) then be stored in a format that allows zooming, for example : https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-03967/1

Archive.org has a non destructive book scanning technique! http://blog.archive.org/2021/02/09/meet-eliza-zhang-book-sca...

Nice. I suppose it also depends on how rare the item being scanned is. For a recent printed work, with multiple copies it's less important, while scanning a fragment from a Genizah or a notebook is much more careful process.

Re: €2.6M spent for a book at auction, believed they would own the IP

#86

Post by rezonant »

null_object wrote: post #47
camjw wrote: post #30

My favorite part of this story is that they 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[0]. Also, how is this "decentralised" when one person owns over 50% of the voting token? [0] https://snapshot.org/#/dunedao.eth/proposal/0x2038fc240d0e85...

> the "core team" has started paying themselves ~$30k a month each But don't forget this team has the Q1 deliverable of presenting "a film treatment and budget by Roble Ridge Productions for the original animated limited series inspired by the book for a community vote on Snapshot" - which one can only assume will be a lot of work... :)

And also will be unauthorized since they own no rights to derivative work (or even the original work)

Re: €2.6M spent for a book at auction, believed they would own the IP

#87

Post by libertine »

knorker wrote: post #40
libertine wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I don't know what they're doing Now it will be hosted on some other server as well (THE REAL DECENTRALIZED SERVER) but wrapped into some NFT, where they will sell each page - or even better - each square of the storyboard, coated into some fucked up story like: "You can own a piece of a future TV Show based on this story board!" And they will probably come out profiting because people will buy this illusion. Edit: F…

Ah, that's interesting. They can't, of course, sell the images themselves; they don't hold the copyright. But they can sell URLs referring to the content. That's pretty clever. I mean it's super dumb, but it's clever. By that I mean that an NFT whose content is an URL to an image you don't own, is dumb. But it's clever to "mint" these, and you'll find more fools to buy the NFTs if you give the appearance of legitimac…

I don't know the legal intricacies of this, like to what extent can they sell not the content but the actual physical square piece of the book, under an NFT?

For example, a company called MSCHF sold 999 fake Warhol drawings and 1 real[0], all mixed up so no one knows which one is the real one, for 250$ each... can they do this? Is this legal? At least people were aware of it, so I doubt it's fraud.

Here's the math of it:

- they paid 8,125$ for the original;

- they sold 1000 for 250$ = 250,000$

- they profited 250,000$ - 8,125$ = 241k$

Of course this was also a mix of a PR stunt, still, if you can do PR stunts and profit... I mean... isn't this what Supreme has been doing for years?

So I don't even think the legality of it all is a issue, because has you hinted, people are deliberately rolling into this...stupidity(?).

I think all of these use similar emotional mechanisms of gambling, which if you think about it, most of the current collectibles market nowadays is gambling for everyone, kids included.

[0]https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/art-pranksters-sel...

Re: €2.6M spent for a book at auction, believed they would own the IP

#89

Post by loceng »

astoor wrote: post #72
camjw wrote: post #30

My favorite part of this story is that they 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[0]. Also, how is this "decentralised" when one person owns over 50% of the voting token? [0] https://snapshot.org/#/dunedao.eth/proposal/0x2038fc240d0e85...

Will be interesting to see how this, as in the whole DAO space, works out. Part of the problem with the ICO craze in 2017* is that the founders got all the money up front without having any obligation to do anything, so the tiny minority of well intentioned ones ended up simply enjoying the money rather than doing something hard like actual work. Seems like this is still a risk here - the founder can string people al…

Which is why there are rules and layers of checks to actually IPO - another term misappropriated to ICO like currency was misappropriated for cryptocurrency to mislead; stock markets would lose all trust and credibility if they didn't curate and require due diligence.

Re: €2.6M spent for a book at auction, believed they would own the IP

#90

Post by Hokusai »

netcan wrote: post #68

This is, obviously, silly. There are a lot of silly cryptostuff. Silliness aside though, this highlights a point to me. Methods of organising are (1) very important (2) relatively undiverse (3) hard to create out of whole cloth. The creation/ascendance of "modern" joint stock companies circa 1600 was (arguably) responsible for some serious revolution. The 90s produced some very interesting examples: GNU, Linux, Wikip…

> stupidity and creativity are often neighbors

That seems to be true in movies, but in the real world new advancements are created by experts that know the basics. Serendipity is part of that, but you need to have the basic knowledge.

I will concede, thou, that ideas to be rich can come from anywhere as the only metric is to convince investors, to produce something useful is not required.

Post reply on HN