NFTs are the flavor of the week this year. Everybody is doing it. Heck, I’ve even done it (mainly to learn how, and to maybe help out a young artist).
NFT technology is, in some ways, very limited. Basically, it is a digitized form for a ‘certificate of authenticity’, along with mechanisms for buying and selling them. That’s all they are, that’s all they do.
But, of course, people can buy and sell all kinds of things, and make up the most complicated stories out of nothing more than this.
This week we read that folks at Berkeley are selling NFTs of images of historic patent disclosures [2]. That’s right, old university paperwork is being auctioned as ‘collectable’.
Sigh.
What you are buying is an image that “represents the CTLA-4 invention disclosure” forms (from 1995), and a similar NFT will represent the early disclosure of CRISPR technology. To be clear, this is an image of some documents that are in a public archive. So you can, in principle, see it or get it for free. Not that anyone other than a historian has much use for this.
(For those who don’t work at a University: at most institutions, all employees are required to “disclose” any idea they have that is potentially patentable or otherwise commercially valuable to the Uni. These first documents are typically sketchy, just enough for bureaucrats to decide whether to get involved, i.e., claim a slice of the action. Most of these disclosures go nowhere, but if the U. is interested there will be official documents with more details. The NFT is the early ‘here’s my idea’ document, with few details.)
Obviously, everyone wonders “why”?
The University is doing this as a fund raising gimmick. Mugs, tee shirts, and now reproductions of decades old internal memos.
Why would anyone buy this? It’s hard for me to guess the mind of a collector. These images are souvenirs of great ideas developed at Berkeley. But, like any souvenir, it represents a memory. In this case, a memory of someone else’s great work.
But it you want to support research at UCB, you can just donate money. You don’t need to ‘buy’ souvenirs.
How is this even legal? I mean, these are public documents from a public archive? I guess it’s legal to make a copy of a public document and sell it to someone if they really want to buy it. As long as the buyer understands what they are buying it’s not fraud, it’s just dumb.
In fact, Kenneth Chang quotes the bright spark in UCB’s IP office who thought of this scheme as saying that this is not just a document, it is “digital art” [1]. I.e., the image is a lovingly constructed representation of 10 pages of lab notebook like info.
“The Allison NFT is more than a simple digital document. “It’s a combination of a lab notebook and digital art,” Mr. Cohen said. A single image includes 10 pages but one can zoom in and read the documents. “I really wanted to preserve the ability to read the history in addition to viewing the beauty of the image,” he said.”
(Michael Alvarez Cohen quoted in [1])
So, if it’s “art”, then anything goes, right?
By now we should all realize that not only is Fandom a way of life, it is beyond all reason. Fans will fetishize anything.
So, for all you fans of red tape, here you go! Now you can pay big bucks to admire historic paperwork.
And all you researchers out there, take heart. All that paperwork may someday be collectables worth tens of dollars!
I guess there is one bit of good news. Tedious paperwork is something that Universities will never run out of. If they can monetize this product, that may help budget woes.
- Kenneth Chang, You Can Buy a Piece of a Nobel Prize-Winning Discovery, in New York Times. 2021: New York. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/27/science/nobel-prize-nft-berkeley.html
- UCBerkeley. The Fourth Pillar (UC Berkeley, 2021). 2021, https://foundation.app/UCBerkeley/the-fourth-pillar-uc-berkeley-2021-41258.
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