May want to check out publictimestamp.org, which has some of the timestamping APIs in place and has similar establishing-prior-art goals.
On 11/8/11 7:32 AM, Keith Lofstrom wrote: > 18 years ago, Stuart Haber filed U.S. patents for a scheme to > timestamp digital documents for legal proof and other purposes. > The document is hashed, the cryptographic hash is sent to his > company (surety.com). A file of those hashes is itself hashed, > with the resulting hash printed as an advertisement in a dated > newspaper of record such as the New York Times or the Asahi Shimbun . > > Dr. Haber's first U.S. patents will expire near the end of 2012. > > Rsync hashes the files that dirvish backs up, though not with > cryptographic strength. However, it may be practical to > cryptographically hash a subset of the files rsync backs up > daily (using the rsync log files to sense changes), and save > those hashes in another file (again daily), hash that file, > then send those hashes to volunteer hash storage servers at > other sites. Those servers could hash their daily collections > and forward them to each other, eventually creating literally > "global" hashes which could be published daily in newspapers > of record around the world. > > Why do this? Sadly, some of the open source code we develop > (or the public domain inventions I disclose) is stolen and > patented by trolls. Proving a public disclosure as prior art > (to invalidate the patent) can be difficult. If we put our > inventions and code and ideas on the web, that can be a > public disclosure, but it is not legally timestamped with > proven provenance so it can be used in court. Perhaps, > with this process, it will be easier to prove the priority > of our public disclosures and help fight these patents. > > Dirvish is a good platform to add this feature to. More > likely, the dirvish process can call another program using > the post-process directive. That additional program does > the cryptographic hash and sends it to other sites. This > can be done on the backup machine after backups are complete. > Perhaps our community could begin the development of a program > for this, and deploy it after Surety's first patents expire. > > Keith > _______________________________________________ Dirvish mailing list [email protected] http://www.dirvish.org/mailman/listinfo/dirvish
