[Savannah-hackers] submission of Proofs-of-Prior-Art - savannah.gnu.org

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Ole Tange <address@hidden> described the package as follows:
License: gpl
Other License: 
Package: Proofs-of-Prior-Art
System name: popa
Type: 2

Description:
Proofs of prior art (PoPA).

This project is for implementing the idea from support ID #100992:

https://savannah.gnu.org/support/?func=detailsupport&support_id=100992&group_id=11

In the future software patents will become a larger problem. One of the things 
that can invalidate a patent is prior art. There is no doubt that Savannah will 
contain stuff that can be used as prior
art. Also there is a risk that some Savannah users may be sued injusticely 
simple because they seem to infringe a patent but where the Savannah user has 
prior art.

So what we need to do is to be able to prove in court that the given file in 
CVS _did_ exist at a given point in time. Here is a simple way to do that:

* md5sum all files
* put the md5sums into a file called M-all
* publish the md5sum of M-all in a printed newspaper (i.e. a free-ads paper)
* store M-all for future use

This should be done periodically (once a month will probably be
sufficient). With the published md5sum it should be possble to prove
in court that M-all did indeed exist at the time of publishing. And with M-all 
it should be possble to prove in court that the file in question did indeed 
exist before the time of publishing.

The reason for not using GPG-signatures is that this may confuse matters in 
court. Who has signed the files is _not_ important. What _is_ important is that 
the file did exist at a given point in time.

The files in this project will be dated versions of M-all and when and where 
M-all\'s md5sum was published.

The project does not exist and I will need help from savannahs sysadmins to 
rsync all projects and extract all version of all files of all CVS repositories.

Other Software Required:
rsync (ssh)
CVS
md5sum
perl

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