You know, the human race managed this pretty successfully for a few hundred years before computers... seems like this might be overthinking it.
> On May 23, 2020, at 6:30 PM, David Wright <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Sat 23 May 2020 at 23:35:10 (+0200), Hans Åberg wrote: >>>> On 23 May 2020, at 23:00, antlists <[email protected]> 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. > > Yes, not cyptographically secure. But that's not the threat model, is it? > > So, I carefully craft a document whose MD5 digest matches the musical > work. What shall I do? I've either created another work that the real > owner can pass of as theirs, depriving me of the benefit, or I've > created a confession of past crimes, which I can hand to the police > so that the owner, my rival composer, gets locked up. > > They don't seem very likely scenarios. > > However, I don't expect it to cost many more pennies to publish > several digests. > > Cheers, > David.
