> On 23 May 2020, at 23:00, antlists <antli...@youngman.org.uk> wrote: > > On 23/05/2020 20:21, Valentin Villenave wrote: >> I’m not saying the world is a nice place (it isn’t); you should, at >> the very least, secure*your* copyright by having a solid proof of >> anteriority, as we discussed. What I’m saying is that you shouldn’t >> overestimate the possible threat to your work if you were to publish >> it freely, nor the amount and quality of “protection” you’ll get from >> any RMO out there. > > for the sake of a few pennies, there's an easy way to prove the date. Used, I > believe, by some law firm in America for its legal documents, and easy enough > to do here in England too. > > Put all of your stuff on a CD. Now run a program that generates an MD5 > checksum or whatever it is, and save both the command and output to a text > file. (I'd throw in a listing of the CD too.) Print this, as an advert, in a > legal newspaper such as - in London - Lloyds Gazette. > > That CD can now be copied freely, the MD5 sum won't change. And the advert > proves that it was in existence on the date of the newspaper. You don't even > need to save a copy of the newspaper - the fact that it is a newspaper of > legal announcements means that there will be loads of copies kept, probably a > lot of them by courts themselves!
Don’t use MD5 though, as it is not considered secure. SHA-256 and SHA-512 are better. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Md5sum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHA-2