Spice DAO acquires Dune book for 2.6 million euros – without rights

To understand the current whirl, one must first look at the subject at hand: the 1965 book Dune, written by Frank Herbert. More specifically, this is about one of the 20 original editions of the vision that director Alejandro Jodorowsky developed for a possible film adaptation. The book is now considered a science fiction bible and a inspiration for movies like “Star Wars” or “Alien”. Jodorowsky himself failed to implement the template in the 1970s.

What does that have to do with today?

One of these issues has now been auctioned at Christie’s in November 2021. The art experts estimate the value at between 25,000 and 35,000 euros, it was sold for 2.66 million euros.

The reason for this high price was the “Spice DAO” (Decentralized autonomous organization). This auctioned the book to, according to its own statement, make the individual pages available to the public as NFTs and produce a series based on the contents.

This caused ridicule and malice on social media. Because the book has not only been fully digitized since 2021 and is therefore accessible to everyone. The organization has also not acquired the necessary licensing and administrative rights – so it is not allowed to film a series based on the book, let alone publish it.

Is the Schadenfreude justified?

The fact that the Spice DAO is portrayed as relatively uneducated and stupid in the media is not entirely fair at this point. Already in one statements from December 2, 2021, they pointed out that they see the problems with the series adaptation:

While we do not own the intellectual property of Frank Herbert’s masterpiece, we have a unique opportunity to create our own addition to the genre in homage to the giants before us.

Spice DAO, December 2, 2021

So it will remain exciting how the decentralized organization will manage to sell the planned mini-series to a streaming service without infringing on the rights mentioned. Possibly the campaign, the amount paid and the current media hype was nothing more than a pretty daring PR campaign. For the time being, there is nothing to say against the tokenization of the individual pages or stories from them. The Spice DAO can digitize the book pages, market them as NFT and sell them via a platform.