Comment by dmitriid | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dmitriid | Hacker News Reader

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Ah yes. And don't forget their Q&A series of tweets. I'm linking to the best one: https://twitter.com/TheSpiceDAO/status/1484285677646729219?s...

--- 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.

It seems to me that the communication both in the original tweet and the subsequent communication is consistent:

- 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.

The only reason they should have spent $2.6m at auction is, if there was another bidder taking them that high.

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

Due to the nature of the DAO, their maximum bid was known beforehand, and I don’t know if there was a mechanism to bail out at that point, and with short notice.

Edit: Except the person/people tasked with doing the actual bidding making an executive decision to, but would that have been within their mandate?

But why buy the book, for any amount? It was already available scanned to everyone for free online. The purchase literally didn’t further any of their stated goals, unless they thought it would give them rights to the IP.

It seems clear that the purchase of the book was a purpose in and of itself.

Why would people come together to do that? Owning a copy of the book gives them no rights or possibilities to do anything they couldn’t before, except keeping it at someone’s house or do viewings of it in meatspace. Is the latter the idea?

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