[LINK] Tim Berners-Lee sells original www source code for $5.4m

[Roger Clarke]

> On 2/7/21 12:50 am, Stephen Loosley wrote:
>> Tim Berners-Lee’s NFT of world wide web source code sold for $5.4m ...

On 3/7/21 9:36 am, Tom Worthington wrote:
> It isn't owned by CERN?

It's a complicated discussion, based partly on the meaning of 'it'.

Firstly, it's a bundle of things.

But I guess the focus is on 'the code'.

Neither data nor software is real estate or a chattel, so to the extent
that the notion of ownership applies, it's a question of ownership of
copyright in one or more works.

Copyright-ownership in the first 1990 code would be tricky to establish.

And there's a good chance that CERN gave its blessing a long time ago to
whatever TBL wanted to do with it.

In any case, CERN gets more than enough taxpayers' money for its
decades-long, 'high'-science', Alice-in-Wonderland experiments, the
history of the Web is an irrelevance, and it would seem unlikely to
assert its ownership even if it has a strong case.


-- 
Roger Clarke                            mailto:Roger.Clarke at xamax.com.au
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Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Law            University of N.S.W.
Visiting Professor in Computer Science    Australian National University