the fever for dunes does not subside and everyone seems to want a piece of what has been one of the greatest successes of recent literature and cinema. In fact, recently no less than 2.66 million euros have been paid for a copy of a curious book of dunes. And the reason is the strangest and, frankly, ridiculous. We do not know very well what the buyers were thinking, but we will tell you all the details of this peculiar event.
In November 2021, the famous Christie’s house, famous for putting up for sale historical works of art, put a book up for auction dunesbut it was not an edition of the author’s novel.
Specifically, it was the book that the author Alejandro Jodorowsky compiled with sketches, drawings and concepts for his legendary interpretation of dunes in the form of a film that was never made.
Cartoonist, screenwriter, playwright and even a magician, Jodorowsky’s talent is as undeniable as the fact that he’s like a watering can, in a good creative sense. That book, used to present your project to film studiosis a legend and there are very few physical copies.
One of them is the one that was auctioned at Christie’s and the starting price was around 30,000 euros.
More than 2.5 million euros (and because you don’t know how copyright works)
Despite that asking price, a collective (crypto-collective they call themselves, so you can imagine where the shots are going) called TheSpiceDAO, managed to win the bid for the incredible sum of 2.66 million euros.
The objectives they intend with the acquisition revealed it on their own Twitter account.
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
These are:
- Make the book public (to the extent permitted by law).
- Produce an original animated limited series inspired by the book and sell it to a service streaming.
- Support projects derived from the community.
These people seem to think it works like this: I buy a copy of someone’s book, weird as it is, and magically get the rights to the work.
That is what they believe and what would allow them to do these three things. But obviously Jodorowsky does not have the rights to dunes for having made the book with which he wanted to sell his film, nor does buying one of the volumes give them to you no way.
If you want to do something similar, but cheaper, go buy the latest issue of spider-man and, by that same logic, you will have the rights that Sony and Marvel have fought over for centuries. A seamless plan.
I just don’t know what to say anymore, but it gives a good account of the current state of things and the mentality of the sectors linked to crypto.
Yes, I admit it, they had more than two and a half million and I’m poor, so I don’t know anything, although a little more than they do about copyright it seems that I do.
And by the way, point 1 of making the book public? The book has been available to the public for years on the Internet. There you have it, it’s a cool rarity. Check it out before they turn it into NFT or something, it might as well.
