DAO buys book in an auction for 2.66 million € (USD 3 million) – 100 times the estimated worth – thinking they now have the copyright. They don’t.

What a weird story: Spice DAO have bought a copy of a book for about $3 million (here they announce it). It is a screenplay and illustrations of a film that never happened, an attempt by Alejandro Jodorowsky to make his own version of Dune. The movie would have been huge but never happened, and only 20 copies of that book were produced. So sure, this thing has collector's value. Another copy sold three years ago for about $42,500, which is a lot of money. It's less than 1.5% of what the DAO now paid though.

The thing is: the DAO bought it to "liberate" it, make it available to the public. But they obviously can't – they didn't buy the copyright, they bought a copy of it, and it will be under copyright for DECADES. And even funnier: it has been publicly available since long before they bought it, there are scanned and photographed versions on the internet. According to the tweet, the DAO also plans to "Produce an original animated limited series inspired by the book and sell it to a streaming service" – which they absolutely won't be able to do, if it's too similar to the book they will definitely be sued by the copyright owners.

A lot of what is currently going on with crypto, NFTs and DAOs seems crazy to me, and I think we will look back at it in a few years and will wonder what had gotten into people in the early 2020s. This is definitely one of the more stupid examples.

Edit: forgot to add a source for "100 times the estimated price", it was estimated at 25,000 to 35,000€