Sometimes this works. The 19th century San Francisco eccentric “Emperor” Norton made his own money which was sometimes accepted at various SF establishments. And now, of course, surviving examples are worth far more than their stated amounts.
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I’ve been wading through the twitter threads and various articles and it sounds like at least some people associated with this project do understand that they don’t own the copyright and can’t just go putting it up on the internet or making animated series. I don’t think most of the community that put money (or crypto or whatever) in to this understand that, but someone does. But I think they have wildly underestimated the copyright morass that exists here. Just off the top of my head, I would expect (at least) the following groups to have a possible copyright interest in this pitchbook: Frank Herbert’s estate, HR Giger’s estate, a book publishing house (or multiple book publishing houses), Warner Bros (who likely has some sort of exclusive license to use Dune IP) and a smattering of other artists or contributors or their estates.
Based on the publicity this has received and the fact that some of the project leaders have been interviewed under their real names, I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve already started receiving letters from Warner Bros’ lawyers bluntly reminding them of how copyright law works. Warner Bros didn’t just spend $165M making a Dune movie so that some crypto bros could ride their coattails.
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If any of you right click these freely available pictures of the book and make NFTs of the images I will be sad.
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My question is who else was bidding to get it up that high and did they have similar aspirations?
So, who does this copyright of this work belong to? My understanding is, this was a very very small, basically custom made run put together by people involved in the pre-production of the film. So is it the film company who owns it? The rights holder of Dune? Is it both?
If only one entity owns the rights, it probably would be doable to get the rights released for an authorized reprinting of the book. Would that make money? I dunno. As others pointed out all or most of the book has been photographed (albeit not well) and posted online. But given the big name artists involved, there would be interest in a printed book to hold and turn the pages, IMO. Owning the book just gives one the reference material to make scans etc. But it certainly doesn’t guarantee the rights holders would go along.
If there is more than one entity that owns the rights - projects like that rarely get done.
ETA - hell, the art could be copyright by the artists as well, which would make this project nigh impossible or very very expensive.
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I’m guessing it’s more than one. I don’t work in entertainment law (and I definitely didn’t work in entertainment law almost 5 decades ago) so I don’t know what the industry norm is for these things. But this was meant as a pitchbook. A very limited number of copies were made, for a specific purpose, with a limited audience, at a time when making and distributing copies of things was hard. It was not meant to be a commercial product on its own that would be widely distributed. So it wouldn’t surprise me at all if the copyright issues were not carefully thought through or at least not carefully documented or even if they were, they would only have been concerned with obtaining the rights needed to accomplish the limited goal of producing something for a few studio execs to read privately. I would be shocked if all the rights needed to produce a commercial work based on this pitchbook were all packaged up neat and tidy.
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“Making the book public”. . . .
Oh man, you mean the copy I read at the local library is a bootleg?
All the words were the same but somehow I feel cheated.
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I keep thinking there must be more to NFTs, but I just don’t see it. I certainly like Keanu Reeve’s reaction to Matrix Resurrection NFTs.
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A million years ago I worked at Kinko’s and am pretty sure a very high percentage of the population thinks once they’ve bought a physical copy of some media they think they own the copyright. Explaining it got exhausting.
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I believe there is a scanned version of it online as well.
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You mean your Kinko’s actually stopped people from photocopying textbooks? If so, yours was the only one that did – that was pretty much the business model they had in the 1980s and 1990s. I hear the kids these days find PDFs online instead.
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The concept of “value” has come a long way since barter.
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you had the right to copy something you owned for you own use. Kinkos lived by that rule.
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Much like Trump, the (stupid) surface is all there is to it, and the whole thing is toxic, full of willful ignorance of everything, and endless grift.
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Sooner or later, the people playing these games are going to get slammed hard by the IRS.
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I so want a version of that book sold as a coffee table style book, within the price range of most people…
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The first question is does the printing and distribution of the small number of copies count as “publication”? Because before the 1976 copyright act federal copyright did not exist in a work until it was published with the proper notice (eg copyright 1973 by name) So if this counts as published (it might not, since no copies were for sale to the public) and did not include notice, there is no copyright in this work. If this is not a published work, then i believe it fell under federal copyright when the 1976 copyright act became effective. Of course this was probably a “work made for hire” so the production company would probably be the author for legal purposes.
And of course the rights to this derivative work, would not give you the right to do anything with the original work, “Dune.”
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Fixed that for you.
The best descriptor for NFTs I’ve seen yet is “A digital receipt for alleged ownership of a digital thing at the URL the NFT is pointing at.” It’s similar to the old old scam of people selling certificates to people of ownership to a star or asteroid or a plot on the moon or such.
In reality, it’s grifts all the way down, with assorted side shows of art and content theft, side grifts, ponzi scams and environmental abuse all wrapped up in one glorious burning sewage fire.
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I remember Kodak announcing that they were looking into the blockchain for rights management for images. NFTs might actually have some substance if there were, at any point, any rights conferred. At this point, they’re less useful than the Yapese Rai Stones, as noone actually recognizes your ownership as conferring you any of the actual benefits of ownership.
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That’s one level of looking at it.
I prefer pointing out that it’s an extension of the Bitcoin idea, and the best description I’ve seen of Bitcoin as a concept is: “Uses very complicated mathematics to turn electricity into money laundering.”
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I don’t believe that’s actually the case. The authors never controlled the copyright for those novels because the Star Wars franchise was owned by Lucasfilm and the novels were commissioned as work-for-hire.
The authors are contractually entitled to royalties, but they don’t own the copyright any more than Leigh Brackett and Lawrence Kasdan owned the copyright for The Empire Strikes Back.
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