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Sir Tim Berners-Lee the famous source code provided the World Wide Web for free. But he has now raised more than $ 5.4 million at auction for a copy of his autograph non-fungible toga or NFT, On sale through Sotheby’s.
It joins Berners-Lee’s NFT an eclectic company, Including Jack Dorsey’s first tweet, a New York Times column, Pringles Flavor called “CryptoCrisp,” a lifetime coupon code for an online kratom shopper, a rental for a space located in the San Francisco Mission District, a 52-minute live message that the shameless actor Armie Hammer believes is sexually explicit. peten audio file. But this last file has been added An endless list of NFT collectibles it is an artifact with an air of gravity, a reminder of a faded pioneer of the Internet. Berners-Lee wrote the code while working at CERN in Switzerland in the early 1990s, creating what he called a “WorldWideWeb” from a NeXT computer. In addition to being the same copy of the code, the auction transport included a 30-minute animation depicting the code being written, a scalable graphical vector representing the entire code, and a letter written by Berners-Lee this year. write the code. (Berners-Lee will donate the money, but has not specified where the funds will go.)
This is a special time for internet history lovers. Sales allow you to feel the ownership of an important part of history. But it also distinguishes between two different tensions of techno-optimism. The code written by Berners-Lee has not been protected by copyright or intellectual property laws since 1993, a few years after its inception. “It pushed CERN to release it entirely as a public domain,” says Marc Weber, curator of the Computer History Museum. “Some people think that was very critical to the success of the networks.” It was the main basis for the free software movement to show how innovators can move forward in history by choosing collaboration over profit. Now, a few decades later, this iconically free code is making money.
Or, somehow. Berners-Lee does not sell the actual code, but the equivalent of a copy of the autograph. The rise of the NFT allowed Berners-Lee to raise money for his estate without trying to reclaim his intellectual property rights, which at this point, however, would have been impossible. NFTs allow Berners-Lee to keep their code in the public domain and at the same time attract someone to purchase a certificate of ownership. Is this commodification directly against the ethos of open source movement? Well, yes. But also: If the Code itself is still in the public domain, does it matter, especially when so much money is lost?
Berners-Lee doesn’t think so. He tell The Guardian that the previous week’s sales didn’t change anything about the opening of the website or the code itself. “I don’t even sell source code. I’m selling a photo I took with a Python program I wrote myself, what the source code would look like if it were pasted on the wall and signed by me, ”he said.
But sales have consequences beyond the WWW. As archivist Rick Prelinger wrote a final column For WIRED, “nothing can be a greater cultural and ethical shock than NFTs for archives.” Prelinger says making historically significant money can make important documents more accessible to genealogists and other scholars without deep pockets. Weber shares these concerns that the Computer History Museum does not have the deep pockets of independent crypto-millionaire collectors; If the creation of code as NFT becomes standard, it may be more difficult to collect copies that are historically significant to the museum’s software library. In some NFT sales, the original digital artifact is removed from the network, such as the makers of the popular meme video “Charlie Bit My Finger”. has sold the clip As an NFT, the original was then removed from YouTube.
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