Well, licensing refers to law, which governs the legal system, which is still mostly effective in protecting privacy, determining ownership, setting wrongs right, etc.
I'm not at all sure I would want a unique identifier, even biometric, on any of my documents in this age of Google (which as far as I can tell cares not a whit about anyone's privacy until threatened by regulators). And if anyone imposed that on me, I'm sure I would want to remove it, and moreover I'm sure it would be trivial to do so, and perhaps trivial to spoof someone else's. Also, considering the large number of computing devices I use every day (not to mention my phone, digital camera, camcorder, audio recorder, etc all of which create "documents"), I can't imagine spending time coding in a personal identifier. I still don't know how to change the ring on my office phone. There has been progress in developing timestamping for pro video with open standards and GPS + net synced timestamp but I don't know where that is at these days. A helpful start would be standardizing metadata fields for documents, for example starting from the Dublin Core, then persuading proprietary developers to actually index that data. Even mapping existing metadata fields in containers (i.e. EXIF) to a standard set would be helpful. All that said I understand the question but I would turn it around, e.g.: "When, after waiting thirty years, will I and others, be able to truly own our digital files on computers and over the internet? In other words, claim ownership from the moment of creation. Is the solution to 'stamp' documents with unique identifiers? How could unambiguous ownership be proven whilst respecting privacy and preventing forgery?" I would add a question of my own: "A technical solution could be imagined to the problem of ownership of personal cloud data -- backup sync to a local machine. We do that with our phone handset address books all the time and it's possible with most webmail accounts, why can't we do it with all social networking sites? For that to work, there needs to be a standard protocol/format. What are SAS providers doing in that regard? Do they have any incentive to do so, or do regulators have to step in?" Sean. On Wed, Oct 1, 2008 at 9:22 AM, Dave Crossland <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On 01/10/2008, Richard P Edwards <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> Hi Ian, >> >> My question... >> When, after waiting thirty years, will I and others, be able to truly >> own our digital files on computers and over the internet? >> Where every file is stamped with digital ownership. A "stamp" that is >> integrated to all files and attributes universal ownership to the >> person who put it in to a computer first. >> Is that so difficult that we still have to rely on licensing to >> contract usage instead of simply getting the code to do the work? > > Please ask them this! :-) > - > Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please > visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. > Unofficial list archive: > http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/ > - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
