The aim (and my hope) is for The Bitjoinery DAO to simply foster equity and ongoing wealth creation amongst the creators of a project’s intellectual property.
Traditionally when you work for a creative project, as an individual you commit your time and skills to a project, and are compensated for it, typically by time committed.
There are no longer lasting economic benefits unless you are already an established creative with the resources to negotiate a good deal with your employer or contract.
The Bitjoinery aims to afford the same benefits the hot shot creatives get to creatives that do not have the resources to negotiate a fair cut on the intellectual property rights they help create and future economic benefits.
Steven Spielberg’s net worth in 2022 is 3.7 billion USD largely due to his position in an organisation that relies on many hundreds if not thousands of creative individuals.
Going forward this model of wealth creation rather than floating towards a single individual or organisation will be better distributed amongst those that contribute and create the works that form the entire IP.
The Bitjoinery aims to achieve this in the following way:
1. Works completed by creatives when submitted and accepted into a project will immediately become part of a projects collection or “body of work”; this process of acceptance will result in an NFT being generated to record the works and its original owner.
2. The accumulation of all the works contributed by individuals working on a project will make up the entire intellectual property for that specific project.
3. The resulting collection of works submitted and registered as NFT contributions can then be floated on the open market where the “body of work” can become fractionalised and traded amongst the public, effectively making liquid the collectively produced asset.
This method of managing IP rights amongst a large distributed group of creative individuals allows for the original creator to subject their creative input directly to the market place and if they hold on to their NFTs potentially see an economical return on their creative contributions over time.
In addition to providing a secure way for the individual to own their creatives IP rights The Bitjoinery should also provide for:
1. A way for individual creators to benefit economically from the entire “body of work” so that if some of the NFT assets created within a project are not as successful as others, the collective still benefits economically to some degree.
2. A legal insurance fund to allow creatives to pursue any infringements on their creative works in a fast and simple manner.
3. A future fund to allow creatives that contributed to past projects to access economic resources to pursue their own creative visions.
Personal pain point:
While this idea for a DAO is based somewhat from an outsider’s perspective, I have personally been absorbed and spat out by the machine that is mass media – it leaves a sense of being used and I can imagine there are a number of creatives out there that likely feel the same way.
In 2015 a popular TV channel here in Sweden used 6 minutes of a film I made for a client without even an email to ask if it was okay. It was played on a popular morning television show to millions of Swedes and I watched it in all its glory.
In that moment I felt amazed that so many people were watching my footage of beautiful Sweden as seen from way up in the clouds.
But that feeling quickly dissipated as just after the segment ended, I felt quite used, and the fact that I had put all those hours and passion into producing that piece only for a massive TV company to come along and broadcast it without any author recognition really upset me and it made me want to fight.
I collected up all the evidence and consulted an entertainment lawyer, within the first five minutes of the call the lawyer recommend I do not pursue the case, sighting the fact I was really a “nobody’ and that I should just be happy with the fact it was broadcasted at all.
I bit my lip and thought to myself I will just maintain the documentation in case I ever have this happen again or in case one day I become a “somebody.”
In code we trust:
I’m unsure if The Bitjoinery DAO can fix this but I view this as just one of many many problems creative industry people have to navigate which, while these problems typically created by humans; can and will be replaced by code.
I am, and The Bitjoinery is blockchain agnostic, but it’s quite clear that a smart contract or series of smart contracts would better achieve a more beneficial result for the collective group of creators than a traditional studio which typically hoards wealth over time, see Spielberg.
History:
The Bitjoinery was actually an idea I had back in 2015 to try to create a DAO from Bitjoin. Partly influenced by the ideas and concepts of the time, the hope was to bring a decentralized more democratic model to the inner workings of Bitjoin If it were to become a corporation.
For profit corporations are often hierarchical structures that tend to float all the wealth to the top of the pyramid over time, while those that create that wealth are often forgotten or inadequately compensated.
My hope now, as back then, is to smash the traditional corporate structure into something more meritocratic but in a way that does not create deep inequality in the organisation.
While there is value in hierarchical structure, larger ones tend to get bloated and slow over time, the beautiful thing about smaller entities is they can move fast and experiment; it’s why I value incubators that allow for the resources from a larger entity to be thrown at the wall by numerous smaller entities working independently.
With The Bitjoinery, “Joiners” are able to play a non-compulsory role in the development of the broader themes we like to explore, namely NFTs, ARGs, Crypto economy and meta economy related projects.
First attempt:
With our first feature film – The Fakefluencer movie we ran a test on the WAX blockchain where within the movie itself we had a QR code that the viewer could scan to mint their own NFT character card. We gave the actors that played each of the 26 characters a heads up to claim the first mints as they hit the market and in the first few months, we saw just under sixty thousand character cards minted by the general public
As part of the smart contract design on WAX, the originator address (the original contract that covered the minting costs) became a fund for those actors that took part in the film, with every public exchange of a character NFT kicking back a percentage to that origin address.
This collection can be found here: https://thefakefluencer.movie/nfts
Potential solutions:
Kickstarting a DAO is actually a rather centralised endeavor when you start with an origin address that has a set of rules (smart contracts) brought into this world by individuals or more rarely an individual.
But what if we started outside that origin? What if we started from out in the world, from the creatives themselves? How might that look practically?
We are actively looking for a human-centric-technical solution worthy of developing into The Bitjoinery with current possible solutions being:
We’re not tied to any solution for the initial formation of The Bitjoinery and while I personally have a vision for this DAO If you would like to discuss this idea further and perhaps even join us – you can visit our Discord group at thebitjoinery.com anytime.
We’re just getting started.
Rich Tella
bitjoinstudios.com
Welcome to Bitjoin Studios 
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