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

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

#211
post #190
post #158

For most of human history, people have lived in small, local information bubbles which were hard to penetrate with facts from the outside world. We see this manifest as the pre-industrial global patchwork of weird and wonderful religious/spiritual/cultural variety. Then somehow the world started to join up and information began to seep into local cultures and sweep away a lot of these pre-rational beliefs. And for a…

In the last ten years there has been a significant change in mainstream content from information (what) to personalities (who). A major driver has been the adoption of social media by the mainstream: Uncle Bob pawing his cell phone while on the toilet. Both closed circle SM (checking on your friends and acquaintances) and public facing SM (checking the influencers) have created a whole new, uncontrolled feeding groun…

> Whether it's about wealth, ideologies or any other aspect of lifestyle: Suddenly it's right there, dangled in front of them.

And for what it's worth, what is considered "luxury" has become more and more accessible/affordable or is not a status symbol any more: 7-series BMW models can be leased for ~800€ a month, luxury watches have fallen out of fashion, expensive clothing items can be rented or you just go for the trend of "fast fashion", even extremely expensive cell phones like Samsung's Galaxy Fold series can be had with a contract for under 100€ a month.

And if you're just looking for something to prop up your Instagram profile, everything you need sans cosmetic products can be rented for cheap - no need to actually buy all that stuff.

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

#212
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happens if you upload copyright protected data in cleartext on a blockchain without having the distribution rights?

You can't really put content on the blockchain, that costs a surprising amount because of all the proof-of-waste. What happens is people put the content on a host and the URL on the blockchain. I suppose in theory it could be kept in IPFS, but few NFTs seem to bother with that.

A handful of words can be copyrightable. The idea of copyrighted content being stored on a blockchain that thousands of nodes duplicate and offer freely is an interesting conundrum that your reply entirely sidesteps. I’m guessing it has happened already but I too am interested in the legal implications of this.

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

#214

Well, not the worst book to spend that much money on. If anyone hasn't seen the documentary Jodorowsky's Dune I highly recommend it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfJi2sfduqk

This YouTube video is blocked for me in the US, but for anyone else curious about the book and it’s history:

It not a copy of Dune, but a copy of a book created to show the vision of one of the first (failed) movie adaptations. French director Jodorowsky had an official adaptation of Dune (and had collaborated with Herbert) [0]. The adaptation failed after running out of money. Notable is the scope of the adaptation: 14 hours and millions poured into pre-production.

Subsequently, a documentary [1] was made about this failed adaptation. I think the parent link is to this documentary.

[0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_(novel)#Early_stalled_a...

[1] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jodorowsky's_Dune

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

#215
This story is misinformation. It is a shame that so many are upvoting and spilling vitriol without properly vetting the information.

In fact, the winners of the book auction do understand that they do not own the intellectual property. They have a goal of using their remaining funds to acquire the intellectual property.

See https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/amansethi/spicedao-dune...:

> As things stand, Saqib still owns Jodorowsky’s bible but is in the process of transferring ownership to the DAO. Meanwhile, the copyrights for the bible’s contents are held by multiple artists and their estates. [...]

> “We can’t just scan it and put it on the internet,” Fang said. But by raising the money as a DAO, Fang said they hoped to show the various estates and stakeholders that there is a massive online interest in making the bible more accessible to the public.

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

#216
post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the last ten years there has been a significant change in mainstream content from information (what) to personalities (who). A major driver has been the adoption of social media by the mainstream: Uncle Bob pawing his cell phone while on the toilet. Both closed circle SM (checking on your friends and acquaintances) and public facing SM (checking the influencers) have created a whole new, uncontrolled feeding groun…

> Whether it's about wealth, ideologies or any other aspect of lifestyle: Suddenly it's right there, dangled in front of them. And for what it's worth, what is considered "luxury" has become more and more accessible/affordable or is not a status symbol any more: 7-series BMW models can be leased for ~800€ a month, luxury watches have fallen out of fashion, expensive clothing items can be rented or you just go for the…

> what is considered "luxury" has become more and more accessible/affordable or is not a status symbol any more

This seems to be the reality for many HN users. But not being able to buy a home or even pay rent seems quite common in the general population.

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

#217
post #158

For most of human history, people have lived in small, local information bubbles which were hard to penetrate with facts from the outside world. We see this manifest as the pre-industrial global patchwork of weird and wonderful religious/spiritual/cultural variety. Then somehow the world started to join up and information began to seep into local cultures and sweep away a lot of these pre-rational beliefs. And for a…

Your description sounds very apt for most of the posters on r/wallstreetbets. Not that most of the chatter on there is much removed from cryptoscams.

> Not that most of the chatter on there is much removed from cryptoscams.

There's an enormous amount of gambling going on on WSB and the average post quality is... well, there's a reason they're self-identifying as apes. But in any case, there is a key difference: WSB deals with legitimate, established companies only and have a zero-tolerance policy against pennystocks and crypto.

The one exception where your comparison is retrospectively (!) on point are wish.com and Chinese stocks, but at least for the Chinese stocks one can say that the radicality of Xi Jinping's actions on the tech/finance sector could not have been reasonably expected - and even Wish.com has been around for over a decade, whereas most of the rug-pull crypto ops and NFTs isn't even two years old.

(Disclosure: HODL'ing a couple hundred euros in Gamestop and AMC)

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

#218

I made the mistake of diving a bit deeper into the group who bought it and found a proposal where they are talking about literally burning the book they just bought after digitizing it for … reasons I guess [0] At this point I just hope its some sort of practical joke or whatever because this just seems a bit much. [0] https://forum.spicedao.xyz/t/nft-of-the-book-w-proof-of-jpeg...

[Q] Do we really want to be perceived as book burners? [A] Tbh I don’t care too much what a bunch of normies that probably didn’t even know the book existed think. The book would still exist but digitized and in the blockchain. [Q] Why not just use Arweave, IPFS, and a variety of other long-term digital preservation strategies? All of them are less expensive and resource-intensive. IPFS is not permanent. If it stops…

I wonder how crunchy the jpeg quality needs to be for this to be viable.

A crude back of the envelope calculation after some googling would put the storage price on Ethereum at around 3.5eth per mb.

So that would be around 10k€ per mb. Certainly doable if they like burning money, but likely not at archival quality.

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

#219
post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let’s suspend disbelief for a moment and pretend everything worked as they say, in what world is giving access to the book to the few people that pay for the nft, “democratising”?

NFT data is public, generally.

Then in what sense is owning a token owning anything?

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

#220
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…

It seems to me that the primary mechanism for organising here - as with most crypto projects - is Discord, not crpyto itself. Crypto is just the vehicle for the fanaticism that drives people to Discord
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