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

[sylvano]

The articles are a bit off the mark, I would suggest. TBL sold a signed
copy of it, not the code itself. Being the inventor the thing means he
can pull in the $5million. I don't a 'sylvano' NFT version of it would
get the same amount. ;-)


"On 30 April 1993, CERN put the World Wide Web software in the public
domain. Later, CERN made a release available with an open licence, a
more sure way to maximise its dissemination. These actions allowed the
web to flourish." - https://home.cern/science/computing/birth-web


sylvano


On Sat, 2021-07-03 at 10:10 +1000, Roger Clarke wrote:
> > 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.
> 
>