A gathering of crypto fans has made an uncommon buy: an intriguing duplicate of Dune, by sci-fi essayist Frank Herbert, for a faltering €2.66 million ($3.04 million).
It’s an odd event when a book expected to get €25,000 goes for multiple times that sum, yet the more peculiar part is that the purchasers – an aggregate called SpiceDAO – seem to accept that claiming an early duplicate of the hit science fiction about space worms gives them the copyright, to do with what they will.
“We won the sale for €2.66M,” SpiceDao composed on Twitter. “Presently our main goal is to: 1. Unveil the book (to the degree allowed by regulation). 2. Produce a unique enlivened restricted series propelled by the book and offer it to a web-based feature. 3. Support subordinate ventures from the local area.”
They have purchased none of these privileges, truth be told. They have purchased a book. This resembles getting a duplicate of Lord of The Rings and accepting you can make the authority film yourself now.
Writing on their forum before the purchase, one user outlined an idea to create a “first-of-a-kind” purchase of a culturally significant work, then “issue a collection of NFTs that are technically innovative and culturally disruptive”.
In the plan, they talk about buying a book, converting it into JPGs, then burning the book, meaning that the “only copies” remaining will be the JPGs.
The poster believed that this would enhance the value of the NFT chain as the only legal copy of the book, and would be an “incredible marketing stunt” and may even present an opportunity to sell a video of them burning the book as an NFT.
In their announcement for having purchased the book (which again is not the copyright) however, their goal appeared to be to allow others to read it by making it public, before releasing an animated series of the novel, which would undoubtedly get them sued into the ground by the actual copyright holders, currently The Herbert Limited Partnership, should they so choose.
“We are in the development stage of our original animated limited series at a time when streaming wars are seeing media groups compete to spend $100+ billion on new content,” they wrote in a follow-up tweet.
Who wants to tell them?