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The Internet

Web Inventor Berners-Lee To Auction Original Code as NFT (ft.com) 59

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee is auctioning his original source code for the web in the form of a "non-fungible token," as digital collectibles continue to fetch millions of dollars despite the recent sell-off in cryptocurrencies. From a report: The auction at Sotheby's will be the first time that Berners-Lee has been able to raise money directly from one of the greatest inventions of the modern era, with the proceeds benefiting initiatives that he and his wife Rosemary support. "The idea is somebody might like a digitally signed version of the code, a bit like plenty of people have asked for physically autographed copies of the book," Berners-Lee said. Auctioneers hope that the one-of-a-kind digital artefact will ignite interest in NFTs beyond their mainstay of artworks, games and sports memorabilia. Investment in NFTs has waned since March's record-breaking $69.3m sale of Beeple's "Everydays: The First 5000 Days."

In an interview with the Financial Times, Berners-Lee, 66, said the auction was an "opportunity to look backâ...â30 years on from the initial code, which was very, very simple, to the state [of the web] now, which has some wonderfully simple aspects to it but also has a lot of issues of various sorts." Unlike the founders of Google, Facebook and Amazon, who gained enormous riches through the web, Berners-Lee is no billionaire. The source code behind the world wide web and its first browser, which were conceived and coded by Berners-Lee between 1989 and 1991, was never patented. Instead, it was released for free into the public domain by Cern, the particle physics laboratory in Switzerland where the British scientist worked at the time. The move enabled widespread uptake of a technology now used by more than 4bn people every day. But for potential archivists and collectors, it also complicated the idea of authenticating Berners-Lee's original work.
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Web Inventor Berners-Lee To Auction Original Code as NFT More

Web Inventor Berners-Lee To Auction Original Code as NFT

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  • It's past time Foustian Bargains were disrupted by blockchain.

  • I got my copy for free (Score:3)

    by Strider- ( 39683 ) on Tuesday June 15, 2021 @11:30AM (#61489522)

    Why on earth would anyone pay for it?

    • To allow Berners-Lee to launder some money, probably.

    • I wonder if the buyer can claim copyright ownership of the work sold by Berners-Lee? Can the NFT be interpreted as a transfer of rights by, say, a judge, in the context of a litigation brought onwards by the buyer? And if the buyer succeeds in getting these rights transfered to him, what happens next?

      I hope Berners-Lee has a good lawyer.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Strider- ( 39683 )

        Given that the copyright probably belongs to CERN, unlikely in this case.

      • I wonder if the buyer can claim copyright ownership of the work sold by Berners-Lee?

        Absolutely not.
        NFT's and copyright have nothing to do with each other.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by GuB-42 ( 2483988 )

        No.

        NFTs by themselves have no legal value, or any value at all for that matter.
        You can probably make a license tied to the NFT if you own the rights, to give it some extra value. And that's when you need a good lawyer. I don't think Berners-Lee did that.

        But now, the owner of the NFT has even less rights than the owner of an signed copy of a book by a famous writer. At least the owner of the book can decide who gets to see the book. And by the book, I mean the physical copy, the author still owns all of the

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by PPH ( 736903 )

      This.

      I can find all the buffer overflow vulnerabilities and poor HTML design decisions I need on StackOverflow.

    • Why on earth would anyone pay for it?

      This is digitally signed to prove it came from him.

    • But, see, you aren't getting a copy. You are getting a token that says you own the original copy. Not the copyright, but the original copy.

      • You are getting a token that says you own the original copy.

        But there is no such thing as an "original copy" when it comes to digital files.

        TBL would have made numerous copies (probably thousands)
        as he developed the software. He has simply designated one copy as
        the "official" one and connected it with an NFT.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jwhyche ( 6192 )

      This has to be one of the most idiotic things I've seen in a long time. You can not have a original digital copy of anything. Unless he wrote the code in one sitting without any bugs, and didn't require him to re-edited it, and is selling the original media it was stored on.

      Anything else, and you are just selling a copy of the original work, and not the original work.

  • why? (Score:3)

    by laxguy ( 1179231 ) on Tuesday June 15, 2021 @12:27PM (#61489806)

    are we supposed to care? just more NFT bullshit

  • Fools and their money (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bradley13 ( 1118935 ) on Tuesday June 15, 2021 @12:34PM (#61489840) Homepage
    While this doesn't exactly improve my opinion of Berners-Lee, I suppose there's no reason for him *not* to try this. Separate fools from their money, why not? It's not entirely clear exactly what source code he's going to bundle up, but it doesn't matter. Whoever buys it probably won't have a clue anyway.
    • Many of the potential buyers might have something of a clue. Investors are diversifying, and that includes adding some high risk/high payout long shots to their portfolio. But there is such an ungodly amount of cash sloshing around and looking for a decent return, that the long shots are getting increasingly weird.

      • This has to be some kind of warning sign, right? When the investing class invests in total batshit, instead of in businesses, it cannot be a good thing. When they have all the money, it means none of the rest of us do. And while some people are enjoying relatively small infusions of cash from the wealthy world, mostly they are going to be trading these things amongst themselves and their currency won't be employing anyone when they do.

        Under this damned-near-pure-capitalism system, we NEED investors to inves

    • It'll be a transferal of funds from someone with more money than sense, to someone with a bit more sense. In that way it might not be a total waste. (I'm assuming Berners-Lee would be above the average celebrity selling an NFT, and above the average rich guy buying an NFT, but I really don't know much about him.)

  • I'm very suspicious that I never hear financial leaders or institutions complain about NTF's, but Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are somehow the anti-Christ.

    Bitcoin...blahblahblah...child porn..blahblahblah..young girl's virginity taken...blahblahblah

    It 's pretty obvious NFT's are nothing but a scam to either launder money or to empty dumb people's wallets.

    • Re:Talk about a bubble (Score:4, Insightful)

      by couchslug ( 175151 ) on Tuesday June 15, 2021 @03:00PM (#61490566)

      "It 's pretty obvious NFT's are nothing but a scam to either launder money or to empty dumb people's wallets."

      Like art and other collectibles.

      • I can hold the Mona Lisa. It's tangible. It's an important cultural artifact. There's only one. It cannot be replaced.

        I can make as many copies of some source code as my hard drive will allow. I can give copies to as many people as I please. There's nothing really special or unique or scarce about any given copy. I could have the man sit down at my keyboard and type it out himself, but it's still just bits on a hard drive.

        NFTs are brilliant. Almost zero effort and cost to produce and yet idiots will pay vas

      • "Art is the proper task of life" -- Friedrich Nietzsche.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Gilmoure ( 18428 )

          “We are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you any different.” –Kurt Vonnegut

  • "with the proceeds benefiting initiatives that he and his wife Rosemary support."

    Almost holidays...

  • To launder a million bucks for some crufty Objective-C and Interface Builder nibs
    that someone can maybe build or run in a hobbled emulator, but not repurpose for anything worthwhile?

    If he needs money for a worthwhile cause, just raise the money without encouraging grift.

  • Wonder how much I can get for my NFT of my Hello World code written in Java. Hopefully enough for a real cup of java.
  • Maybe we should take that code and redo the web.
  • Post the code here, so I can make my own copy (for free)

  • testing the waters (Score:3)

    by sdinfoserv ( 1793266 ) on Tuesday June 15, 2021 @03:41PM (#61490706)
    This is likely a test by TBL to determine how far the internet as he had hoped has deteriorated. NFT’s are a complete joke. As someone already said, it’s like buying pictures of real-estate on the moon. But it’s worse, because if someone moves the wall upon which the pictures are hung, you don’t have rights to that so your NFT becomes void and comes up blank. Or, he just want’s to cash out before he bails on his creation.
  • TBL is selling a NFT for his token... seems almost, but not quite, entirely unlike “God's Final Message to His Creation: ~We apologize for the inconvenience.~"
  • This is a case of sooner or later some idiot is going to part with their money for absolutely nothing
  • Just curious if anyone has ever paid $1000 or more of *real* money for an NFT. In my extremely limited understanding, you aren't buying even a copy of the code (which is free) but you're buying a receipt to say you own...not the copyright for the code...the receipt, maybe?

  • CERN and MIT might object. (Score:3)

    by Egdiroh ( 1086111 ) on Tuesday June 15, 2021 @10:19PM (#61491754)
    As the copyright holders on the code, MIT and CERN, might object to the "original" code being sold. Obvious license to sell a copy is granted as long as the copyright notice is included.
    • He is not selling the copyrights to the original code. He is selling a digitized representation of part of the original code. It's more like an author selling an autographed copy of an excerpt from his book; the author is not selling the rights away. The only thing that makes it more valuable is that it is the original code and it is from Berners-Lee. The code fragment will not run and since it is version 1.0 of the first web browser, it has little functional value.
      • The analogy is poor, since it's MIT & CERN's book, not his, and he's claiming not to be selling the "original" not just a copy off the shelf.

  • ...they finally found the business model for making money out of open source software :-P

  • NFT is for fool's with too much $$$.
  • It's cool that NFT is used since it is a really prospective thing. At least it has many potential uses besides the protection of digital art (which is also very good for artists and owners). Right Click + Save As isn't a threat. Moreover, it can enhance the value of a piece of tokenized art. Or, say, a skin from CS:GO. Some undertakings like an eco-project MyImpactPower use NF tokenized art to sell to the supporters to show their affiliation. Time will tell if NFT survives and spreads, of course, but even n

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