Buying the Rights to Franchises

People are laughing at the SpiceDao for spending $3.8 million on a book. But one thing has shown is a group of fans of a story can get money together to spend on that story. And this can be organised in a decentralised way. We don't need Disney to buy franchises, fans can do that now. 

The stories that are most undervalued in monetary terms compared to how much fans value them are probably 

1. Young Adult stories as people who read these at a formative time find them really important but traditional publishers don't. 

2. Sci-fi and Fantasy books as these are generally seen as less prestigious than standard literature 

3. Non English Language stories.

4. Books that are out of print as that can change who owns the rights or at least makes them cheaper. 

5. One from a few decades ago so the fans are now old enough to have some spare money. 

6. Choose your own adventure and adventure games are eve further out of mainstream critical valuation. Comics have been mined for IP value but they are such a rich and diverse medium I am sure some areas have been ignored.

Fans of a non english language YA sci-fi/fantasy series could for much less than $3.8 million get the IP rights to a story like this. Frequently the author will have the IP rights themselves and they could well be easier to deal with than a publishing company. 

I would guess once you have the rights the order of things to get the story more popular are

1. Republish the story on kindle. Effectively free. Give the author a lot of any money this earns so it is in their interests to encourage the steps below and to sell you the IP rights cheaply.

2. Set up a fan site including forums and fan fiction. Not expensive but it would take up some time with moderation.

3. Create a prize for fan art including images, fashion designs and comics and for fan fiction stories. Again this is very cheap.

If the original language can create enough interest in the franchise to keep these busy

4. Publish special editions of the book. With a new introduction, cover based on a prize winner etc. 

5. Translate the story. A high quality book translation is pretty cheap. Especially if you are not under strict time pressure. Cost 5-15k per language.

6. Copy steps 1->4 in the newly translated language.

After the first franchise you carried this out on you can reuse the website software etc. I would guess each additional franchise would cost under 50k to buy and do these steps with. Even if it was 100k that would still be 38 different franchises resurrected for the price the spiceDAO paid for the physical copy of a book.

And if any one of them really succeeds and becomes popular enough to spawn a movie a large profit could be made. But thinking about the worlds of fans I think just seeing their favorite characters again either back in print for a new generation, back with new adventures in a new series of books is really what most fans want.

A Patreon for Materials

Prizes are a really good way of funding science but are not used enough. All sorts of prizes from longitude to private space have speed up technological development in their area.

Kaggle is an interesting example of current innovation incentivised using prizes. Kaggle defines a metric over a dataset and people try an build models that predict that well. This is then tested over another dataset to prove your predictions are the best. For not very much money a large number of very skilled people work on a defined problem for fun, kudos and the possibility of profit.

1. Typical Kaggle competition lasts 3 months, offers $25,000-100,000 in prize fund and attracts around 1000 specialists

2. At least top 10% of those specialists, ~100 persons are of prime quality, many others 'just' good.
   

Could a similar thing be done for discovering materials with properties we want? There are all sorts of problems that could be solved with materials with new properties. There are commercial incentives to develop many useful materials already. A more efficient solar panel or energy dense battery could have such commercial value lots of people are working on making them already. But some properties of materials are known to be useful but not commercialised yet to have huge competition or budgets trying to create them.

If we agree prizes are a useful incentive. And that we need new materials with useful properties how might a kaggle for such prizes work?

Kaggle has test datasets unknown to competitors held out to prove later which prediction model is best. For a materials version proving specific qualities in the lab would, initially, be too expensive. Relying on the scientific peer review process, of quality journals, would probably be enough initially. Occasionally issues in published materials research comes to light. But that happens in kaggle competitions too. And with prizes fairly low the incentives for shenanigans are not huge. Use a paper being published by a high quality journal as proof that a material has the defined property.

How long would the competitions be open for? The millenium prize for solving known big hard maths problems are open ended. Kaggle competitions are shorter a few month time periods. The time needed for journal papers to be approved and the difficulty of making materials means a year is probably more practical. Having a year competition timeline makes it more open to tinkerers than big grand ambitious challenges. I think 'A prize to someone who makes a wire room temperature superconductor at atmospheric pressure' is too ambitious. 'A prize to someone who publishes the warmest superconductor in a substance that can be turned into a wire by December 2022' is more practical. Competitions for improvements of a defined characteristic over a period of a year or two seem to be the best prize incentives to me.

How much would the prizes be for? Using journals keeps the cost of running the competitions low. But also means huge amounts of money cannot be involved. Also unlike kaggle a company putting up a dataset is not paying the prizes. The prizes would just be donated by people who can see that creating a product with these properties would be useful for improving our lives. As such a Patreon like model where donations are collected would probably be best. Stripe lets foundations setup as non profits set up these sorts of donations. Prizes would probably be in the 100K to -> 1 million range but initially to prove the concept would be much lower. 

What would be a good initial material quality to test this Patreoned Kaggle for materials idea on?