The Wassie Vault

GM friends.

We hope you have all been enjoying Wassie Week. We are about 4 days from the official release of the Wassies by Wassies roadmap and today we have another pre-release announcement.

THE RUG.

We hereby announce our intention to revoke all licenses Loomlock Ltd has granted to all holders of Wassies by Wassie NFTs.

Your licenses to display your Wassies? Yep — that’s all gone.

Yes — we are allowed to do this. Read clause (v) of our terms of ownership:

Loomlock Ltd reserves the right to immediately revoke the licenses without further notice to all NFT Owners and cease the granting of new licenses as long as it simultaneously arranges for the copyright or other intellectual property rights relating to the Wassies to be transferred absolutely, either legally or beneficially to the relevant NFT Owner such that each NFT Owner is not put in a worse position than he/she was in prior to the revocation of the licenses.

No — you can’t sue us and don’t contact your lawyer yet…

We actually figured out how to let you properly own your Wassies.

NFTS — OWNERSHIP AND INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

NFTs and intellectual property (IP) have a strange relationship. We seem to have all collectively agreed that as long as you own an NFT — you have some sort of rights over the image attached to it. Nobody is really sure what sort of rights and nobody really thinks too hard about it. Project founders either say the IP is open source or that they give you some sort of license over it. Every couple weeks — you hear some voices on Twitter asking about the IP problem (normally after a project rugs) but these voices quickly get drowned out by memes, people who think law is lame or more frequently — the next big NFT launch and airdrop.

Now if you want an essay on why most NFT projects don’t actually work when it comes to their IP — click here. For those that don’t want to bore themselves with legalese, here is the TLDR:

• Your license probably doesn’t work unless you minted directly.
• Licenses are secondary rights — for there to be a licensee there must be a licensor
• Licenses are contingent on the project continuing to grant them to you (it is not rug-proof)
• Licenses (even if they work) give you very limited rights.

In other words, if your NFT project licenses you the IP to the artwork, you are wholly reliant on the good faith of the project team to (1) give you a license that isn’t limited in some way, (2) continue to grant you the license and (3) continue supporting the project and ensuring the original IP is held by them.

Even if you have all of the above, you probably don’t get the license if you bought your NFT on the secondary market, your license disappears if your IP owner becomes insolvent / gets wound up and in any case a license will forever be a secondary right contingent on the original IP owner.

Now this is a real problem when our vision for Wassies by Wassies envisage (1) Wassies belonging to the people and (2) interaction with legacy world infrastructure.

loom dart resolved that we would find a way around this — that each NFT holder would own their Wassie.

THE WASSIE VAULT

And so the Wassie Vault was born from loom dart’s resolve and YK’s fever dreams.

Here is a brief explanation of how IP to the Wassies work.

IP over the Wassies — specifically the original Wassie image and its derivatives belong to tukino — the original Wassie artist. Prior to the launch, we discussed with tukino who very kindly sold us the rights to Wassie images based on his original and create new ones (and also made some awesome honoraries for some members of the community).

Until now — the IP for the Wassies have been sitting with the loomlock company.

Now what will happen going forward is that the IP for the artwork for every single Wassie will be permanently transferred into a special trust. This special trust exists forever and is administered by a trustee that is professional, fully independent, licensed and regulated. The trust has a single directive — to recognize the holder of each NFT as the owner of the corresponding artwork.

This way — whether you know it or not — the moment you purchase the NFT for say — Wassie 4150, you would properly own the artwork for this little creature.

And this would entitle you to do whatever you wanted with this creature. You can create artwork, sell merchandise and enter into collabs and nobody — not even the Wassie by Wassies team — can use the artwork for your Wassie as long as you hold the NFT without your permission.

Again, for more info on how all of this works in more detail — the mind behind this has a write-up here.

This also means that if anyone ever were to purchase Wassie 4150 — we may have to replace the Wassie we have picked to feature on this post.

Good thing we chose a CC0 Wassie.

CC0 Wassies?

Not everybody owns an NFT — or enough NFTs to entitle them to use the full range of artwork in the Wassie by Wassies collection. Maybe you really want to put together some artwork of an Outcast killing your Unicorn but don’t happen to have an Outcast. Or perhaps you need a genie to star in your Wassie remake of Aladdin? Or maybe you want to feature a hundred Wassies as enemies in a shooter game?

This is why we have committed 100 Wassies of various types and rarities to a pool of Wassies which the treasury will waive all intellectual property rights to. These Wassies will never be sold — and will forever stay in the treasury as Wassies which anyone can use.

The list of CC0 Wassies will be released in due course.

What does all this mean?

This means there are far more possibilities for this project than any other project still functioning off licenses and that we can properly build a Wassieconomy around the Wassie NFTs.

Want your Wassie featured in one of our grants programs? Contribute your Wassie and see it come to life!

Think you have a cool and rare Wassie? License it to an artist and maybe you could share in the profits of some amazing artwork.

Our vision is to have every single NFT holder feel that their ownership of their Wassie allows them to meaningfully participate in the community without excluding people who don’t own the NFTs.

After all — Wassies are for the people.

The Wassie by Wassies team.

Keep your eyes peeled on the roadmap. Maybe all this will make a lot more sense…

Also — none of this is legal advice.