Re: registering a composition

[Hans Åberg]

> On 23 May 2020, at 23:00, antlists <address@hidden> 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