Vision and Values

What we stand for at HeirloomDAO.

Ownership in history.

History of ownership rights.

Traditionally, the right of ownership of something enables the owner total control over its use and exploitation. The idea of property ownership as a collection of rights in relation to other people is one of the core principles of free-market capitalism and embedded deep within the roots of many nations' history. In many revolutions, including the French, the Russian, the American and the South African, property and ownership questions played a central role.

The right to own things depends on the principle that you own yourself, and therefore if you own yourself, then you own the fruit of your labor. Under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights signed in 1948; “Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.”

Generally speaking, being the owner of the property enables you to freely exploit, sell or transfer your ownership of it to other persons or corporations. For example: a grandfather decides to gift his favorite watch to his grandkid after his death, or a father wants to buy his daughter a brand-new car as a graduation present.

Ownership on software.

Ownership of software is much more complicated than ownership of tangible items such as property, jewelry, or cars. Where on these elements, the ownership is accredited by a receipt or government-issued title.

Generally, the software is protected under copyright law, there are many types of software categorized, but it is indeed considered as property even though you cannot touch it. When a software developer writes any code, they retain the ownership or copyright of the software. The owner of the copyright can then license the copyright to others for use under certain terms and conditions, sell it, or transfer it.

When you acquire software, typically you are not really acquiring the right of ownership of that software installed on your computer, rather you are just buying a license of that software and may use it under certain limitations.

Software licenses do not give almost any rights of ownership to users that acquire them. For example, the software is often tied to the account or personal computer that the individual user when acquiring the product in the first place. It generally goes against the license agreement to try to resell or transfer the software license.

Ownership of software in the 21st century leaves consumers with a highly limited amount of rights over the product they acquire, and place all the power into development companies. Once a consumer purchases a piece of software, it essentially locks and becomes an asset that cannot be transferred, sold or touched in any way.

Designing an alternative

We believe that it's possible to create an alternative business model that empowers consumers and at the same time solves most of the problems attached to developing software today.

Our novel solution is the creation of a marketplace where consumers and software studios freely trade software products and other lifetime subscription deals. Users will acquire the software license in the form of a non-fungible token on an EVM compatible chain. Software licenses will be tied to the possession of the NFT and will not be tied to a user's individual account.

HeirloomDAO will work as an authentication platform in charge of verifying the possession of the NFT token on the user's wallet as the only method required to access the software solution purchased by the consumer. No formal registration is needed.

The NFT license will exclusively live inside the user wallet, with heirloomDAO providing no direct control over it. At any point in time users are free to sell, trade, gift or in any way exploit their software license. The transfer of the NFT token is the only requirement for the transfer of ownership of the software solution, a new user that recently acquired the NFT license on a secondary market would just need to hold it in its wallet to access the platform.

There are no minimum time requirements or lock-up periods in which the user cannot transfer or sell the license from its account. The license token will work the same as any other NFT that currently lives today on the blockchain. Consecutively, it acquires the properties of being censorship-resistant, immutable, and trustless.