Spice DAO (collective) — Spice DAO and the Jodorowsky's Dune book purchase

2022

Artists: Spice DAO (collective) · Year: 2022 · Medium: DAO-based cultural acquisition — a decentralized organization crowdfunded $3M USD to purchase a rare book · Substrate: Ethereum DAO governance structure; crowdfunded ETH; physical rare-book purchase from Christie's auction · Place: Online (distributed) · Institution: Spice DAO (self-organized) Spice DAO was formed in November 2021 by a loose collective of cryptocurrency investors who collectively purchased, at Christie's auction in Paris, a rare storyboard-and-concept-art book for Alejandro Jodorowsky's unrealized 1970s Dune film adaptation for approximately $3 million — roughly a hundred times the book's pre-auction estimate of $25,000-30,000. The purchasers' stated plan was to scan the book, make the contents publicly available as NFTs, and then produce an animated-film adaptation based on the material. The plan did not account for the fact that the DAO did not, in fact, acquire the intellectual-property rights to the Jodorowsky Dune material by purchasing a physical copy of the book; the copyright remained with Jodorowsky and the original film-rights-holders. The DAO's plan to produce a derivative-work film was legally impossible without separate rights-negotiation. The community briefly attempted to pursue the plan anyway before the legal issues became fully clear. Spice DAO is in this archive as the specific case-study of a DAO-driven cultural-acquisition project that failed primarily because its founders and participants did not understand the specific intellectual-property legal framework they were operating within. The $3 million purchase, valued solely for the book's physical-artifact value, was subsequently worth approximately $25,000-30,000 — the book's appropriate auction-market value as a collectible, not as a rights-acquisition vehicle. The community has essentially dissolved. The episode is frequently cited in subsequent discussions of DAO-structured cultural-asset-acquisition as a cautionary reference point: the assumption that a DAO can acquire cultural-production rights through physical-object purchase is legally incorrect, and community-governance structures do not substitute for rights-negotiation processes. Lore The Christie's auction's final price reflected specifically the DAO's aggressive bidding; the book's pre-auction appreciation had not been so substantial, and the specific sale price represented what was widely described as a "crypto-driven" inflation. Alejandro Jodorowsky himself, reached for comment in the months following the sale, expressed bemusement at the price but declined to engage with the DAO's subsequent rights-negotiation overtures. The specific pieces of the book were subsequently sold or distributed among the participating DAO members; the physical book itself is believed to be held by one of the founding members but has not been publicly displayed since the sale. Sources • Christie's — Jodorowsky Dune storyboard book auction record (November 2021). • Spice DAO — documentation and governance archive (partially preserved). • Kent, Dan — "The $3 Million Lesson of Spice DAO" (CoinDesk, 2022).