An NFT Group Bought a Copy of Dune for $3.04 Million Thinking It's the Copyright

A group of crypto investors, called Spice DAO, spent millions of dollars to buy a rare adaptation of a science fiction book, Dune, so that they could make non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and an animated series, The Next Web reported.

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 pic.twitter.com/g4QnF6YZBp

— Spice DAO (?,?) (@TheSpiceDAO) January 15, 2022

Perhaps, unknown to them is the fact that they have only bought a copy of the book and not its actual rights as many media outlets pointed out. 

A decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) is a new way of acquiring unique assets so that a group owns them. The aim of a DAO is to prevent the asset from being lost forever to a private collector and use the power of crowdfunding to raise the money required as well as take decisions pertaining to the asset. In November, we reported how a DAO raised about $47 million to acquire a rare copy of the U.S. Constitution but lost the auction. 

At first glance, the intention behind the purchase of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s adaptation of Dune seems quite noble. As the Next Web reported, there are probably under 20 copies of this adaptation in the world today, and even if they do not help make an animated series, the preservation of the book is a service in itself. 

However, as IFLScience pointed, the DAO wants to convert each page of the book into an NFT and then go ahead and burn the book. While making an NFT collection out of each page makes it easier to own a piece of history in the digital realm, the burning of the book makes no sense at all, unless maybe you are doing it for the publicity or to increase the value of the NFTs that were created prior to the burning. 

Perhaps that was the aim all along. The group got roasted by major media outlets, The Verge reported, and even by random Twitter users like this one. 

You don’t own the copyright to the content you numpties.

Next time invest in science or better yet, education so you can learn how things actually work. https://t.co/lVFKXAJMbK

— Melody GET VACCINATED ? (@ScientistMel) January 17, 2022

The DAO told Gizmodo that they are fully aware that they do not own the copyright to the material. What they intend to do is create a spin-off or their own version of the Dune series and have assembled a creative team to make the world's first NFT-funded feature film.

Probably buying a copy of a previous adaptation of the book for 100 times the base price from an auction house and making themselves an online laughing stock has given them a reach that pr advertisements could have never given. Now, if the feature film does come out, people will definitely be interested in knowing what their version offers, and perhaps burning a copy of Jorodowsky's version is a way to end that chapter once and for all.