Re: registering a composition

[Tim McNamara]

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 <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> On Sat 23 May 2020 at 23:35:10 (+0200), Hans Åberg wrote:
>>>> 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.
> 
> 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.