Eric Searcy wrote: > May want to check out publictimestamp.org, which has some of the > timestamping APIs in place and has similar establishing-prior-art goals.
Thanks for the name. I'd never heard about the project. Since the site itself isn't exactly wide-eyed-newbie friendly, here's a link to a site that hopefully has more explanation: http://www.linuxfoundation.org/collaborate/workgroups/osapa Cheers, Dave > 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 > _______________________________________________ Dirvish mailing list [email protected] http://www.dirvish.org/mailman/listinfo/dirvish
