I'm the guy who created the Swarm platform, Swarm fund and Harvard conference on cryptoequity. The rough conclusions of $100k+ of legal research was that product tokens are highly likely to be regulated as securities in the US but that cooperatively governed organizations are likely to be regulated as partnerships. Notice all the "likely" aspects as this depends either on a clear ruling from the SEC or case law, neither of which exist.

This uncertainty made me withdraw from hosting crowdsales until some precedent was established (I did however, setup two funds that can take positions in crowdsales).

For what it's worth Swarm was a proto-DAO launched on the Bitcoin blockchain in an attempt to do roughly the same thing on the Ethereum blockchain once Ethereum was ready.