So what does that tell you about decentralized decision making other than "people are stupid"?
> (whose starting price was 25k)
That is how auctions work. The only concern with such setups is that information about the amount of money available to such a DAO bidder is public knowledge and thus can be exploited.
And I'll quote it in it's entirety for posterity:
--- start quote ---
We won the auction for €2.66M. Now our mission is to:
1. Make the book public (to the extent permitted by law)
2. Produce an original animated limited series inspired by the book and sell it to a streaming service
3. Support derivative projects from the community
--- end quote ---
Since then they've backtracked saying that they are looking to develop "completely original IP", but that raises the question "why spend money on the Dune book then?".
--- start quote ---
Q: Are you aware that purchasing the book does not give you its copyright?
A: Yes. After two months of outreach, conversations with former business partners and consultations with legal counsel we were not able to reach an agreement with any of the rights holders...
--- end quote ---
And yet, they still were "hell bent on buying the book at any cost".
Now that they realized they have nothing but an expensive book on their hand, they are "developing a new animated series" that they have no money for. You can see the hilarious exchange here: https://forum.spicedao.xyz/t/original-series-package-strateg...
"all you need to approach a streaming service for a sale that would finance the production is a package and not a finished product"
and
"We were quoted $500K USD for a writer’s room early on and quickly abandoned the thought"
They spent 2.6 million dollars on book. This would've comfortably covered a huge chink of an original animated series.
- They did not think it gives them to copyright. - They want to create /original/ IP merely /inspired/ by the book. - These are two separate ventures.
I have no position on whether their decision to spend 2.6 million dollars on it is smart or not; people can ultimately buy what they want, and if people fundraised 2.6 million to buy a book, and the decision makers therefore had the authority to spend as much, I see no problem.
Short of someone literally bidding against them with the foreknowledge of their maximum bid, it seems very unlikely that anyone else would have gone close to that number from the $35k expected price.
A more sane approach if they realised that someone was bidding the up would be to duck out of that auction and by any of the other copies of the book that exist, likely for faaar less than $2.6m
Edit: Except the person/people tasked with doing the actual bidding making an executive decision to, but would that have been within their mandate?
You don't pay 100x est to own a physical copy of a non-unique book, a scan of which is available in full online, for 100x without thinking there is some additional benefit to winning.
Even if you remove the 'they thought it would give them IP rights' stupidity defense you're left with blowing 100x estimated value of other people's money stupidity situation, which is just as bad.
You're just swapping one stupidity that should discredit them from running any kind of DAO for another that should do the same.
That people are also greedy, and prone to motivated reasoning.