Thread by @doctorow

@_loveallthis @hondanhon It's complicated and I'm recovering from hip surgery and on paid meds, so I'll be brief and incomplete.

Note what they are NOT saying: "Fair use enables us to make fan media, even very expansive and identifiable and commercial fan media."

@_loveallthis @hondanhon I have a lot of sympathy for that argument and I think the law is mostly on its side. You have SCOTUS ("Wind Done Gone") and the most successful novel in world history (50 Shades of Grey) in support of it.

@_loveallthis @hondanhon That's the GOOD argument in support of their position. It's not the argument they're making (or feinting at, since they're not actually making arguments AFAICT).

@_loveallthis @hondanhon The argument they're implying is "We spent a lot of money on a rare book, so our uses are presumptively fair."

That is, as many have pointed out, a fucking idiotic argument. It's drivel. Contemplating it makes spinal fluid leak out of my ears. God, it's so fuckin' stupid.

@_loveallthis @hondanhon They have a secondary argument which they've also feinted at, which is slightly more interesting and definitely gnarlier, namely: "Our org is programmatic and executes instructions based on the votes of governance tokens, and they voted for this and now our hands are tied."

@_loveallthis @hondanhon "If you want to stop this from happening, you will somehow have to prevent the Ethereum distributed computing substrate from acting on the direction of our governance tokens, and that means seizing millions of computers all over the world."

@_loveallthis @hondanhon THAT argument would make a fun sf novel. And if it were true, it would pose a fascinating legal and technical conundrum.

The problem is, it's not true at all. It's completely unreflective of the DAO and its capabilities.

@_loveallthis @hondanhon The governance tokens can direct the DAO's spending in support of a project, but it can't actually spend that money. "Adapt this book into fan media" isn't functional code, it's a requirements doc.

@_loveallthis @hondanhon To realize those requirements - to turn them into executed instructions - a named human being will have to ink contracts with artists and writers and animators and film distributors and other actual producers.

@_loveallthis @hondanhon THOSE entities aren't prisoners of self-executing code in a DAO. They're humans with bodies and assets and addresses that can be reached through the civil justice system. Process servers can find them. Their assets can be frozen.

@_loveallthis @hondanhon It would be incredibly reckless of those people to contract to do this work. Maybe they could be duped into it - TWICE, assholes have convinced poor narrators to read my novels for ACX, even though they didn't have the rights, and all that work got flushed away.

@_loveallthis @hondanhon But they wouldn't really have a defense in law. If the DAO votes to hire YOU to set fire to the Bank of America Pyramid, you don't actually have to take the job, and if you do, you'll be committing a felony. Lots of felonies.

@_loveallthis @hondanhon Like I say, there's a pretty fun stfnal plot here in which you have a cloud-based AI that can make and distribute a Jodorowsky Dune adaptation, whose activities are determined by the voting of governance tokens, and the entire process runs untouched by human hands.

@_loveallthis @hondanhon But DAOs are part of financeland, and, as with everything in financeland, it pretends that humans are fungible and irrelevant and expendable, and that human agency doesn't exist.

@_loveallthis @hondanhon So DAOists enthuse that they've built an org that runs on code and just pretend that the code turns into human actions with deterministic perfection.

@_loveallthis @hondanhon They pretend that ordering someone to make a Jodorowsky fan-fim or torch the BofA Pyramid is like asking a computer to decrypt a file - send the command, the action occurs.

@_loveallthis @hondanhon It's like the delusion that human-piloted Ubers are just precursors to fully automated Ubers and can be optimized for eventual robo-drivers without any moral or technical or legal consideration for the meat-drivers actually behind the actual wheel.

@_loveallthis @hondanhon It's a con game, and the people playing it have conned themselves, too.

TLDR:

* fair use good
* fair use not related to buying rare books
* these people are stupid
* DAOs are not automated