Ryhope Lab
Description
"The goal of RyhopeLab is to offer a full set of « licences » inspired from Free and Open Source Licenses (or similar licenses like the IANG License or PPL – Peer Production Licence) specifically “augmented” and designed to support DAOs in their self-governance. This project of licence aims to help the content-DAO - content-DAO meaning : a DAO organized around content such as video-games, software, books, etc - in defining the modalities of collective decision making, value sharing, and the types of possible utilization of the creative collaborative content outside the blockchain ecosystem. The final objective of our team is therefore to provide freely usable contractual frameworks, as standards, allowing DAOs to collectively define the terms of use and governance of collaborative creative contents.
The goal of this project is to design a full set of licences implementing an isomorphism between DAOs governance rules - as defined through blockchain-based smart contracts - and nation-states juridical frameworks." (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tYNMLkKpeSbPuPhusqw6LyUCIy08KeZFmv2KrylOPS4/edit)
Principles
"This attempt will rely on the following hypothesis and rationale.
Most attempts to back DAOs by legal entities - i.e. entities acknowledged by nation-state jurisdictions - refer to profit or non-profit organizations: corporations, foundations, etc. The hypothesis underlying this project is that referring to DAOs as contents instead of organizations may fit with most DAOs use-case while drastically simplifying the problem of their legal status. Indeed, conceiving DAOs as contents allows to express their legal status within the scope of intellectual property, thus excluding most of the juridical concerns about DAOs: utility token vs security token, ownership, etc.
To offer DAOs a convenient isomorphism between blockchain-based governance rules and intellectual property-related categories we intend to leverage, improve and extend the existing licenses (the Peer-Production Licence being the main candidate). Our goal is to identify and map a simple but powerful governance-related parameters - income redistribution, decision-related primitives, etc. - into licence-related clauses. We thus intend to turn the complexity of blockchain-based governance rules into a small-set of parametrable but human-readable licensing rules.
We believe that such an isomorphism, though not suited to all DAOs needs, would offer a lot of advantages to the DAO ecosystem. First, it would allow a lot of DAOs to circumvent the quite cumbersome organization-related right in favor of the much more straightforward Intellectual property right. Secondly, it would drastically lower the barrier for new entrants in the crypto-space by providing them a set of standard, human-readable and easy to use - though highly parametrable - licensing / governance scheme. Thirdly, the use of such a standardized license / governance framework would radically ease the interoperability - and thus the possibility of much more complex cross-interactions - between DAOs. Finally, it would allow DAOs to immediately profit from nation-state jurisdictions in case of disputes unsettable neither in the framework of their own governance nor in the one of the upcoming Aragon Network Jurisdiction.
The Aragon Network Jurisdiction will exist as a technological layer capable of settling a series of conflicts within a DAO : this is important insofar we know that this type of conflicts regulation structurally implies the emergence of common goods. However, if conflict management can not be sufficient to resolve conflicts outside the blockchain environment it will be necessary to create legal tools capable of supporting DAOs in contact with traditional law. The creation of a licence capable of accompanying contents which are governed by a DAO could be an easier point of contact between DAOs and traditional law and could drastically reduce costs and manners of entry into traditional law."
More information
Related Project: Pando