A forum for the support of robust mechanisms of evidence of ownership for intellectual property expressed in any medium

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Frequently Asked Questions

    Why hasn't anyone thought of this before?

    They have. However, it takes time for the algorithms to be accepted and for the networking infrastructure to develop to a stage to make the schemes are practical. This takes years, but now the time seems to be right for wide adoption of IPR registration schemes. Not least because so much of what we do now is in the digital domain.

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    Why should I trust these new methods of IPR protection?

    Basically, you should not. You should be aware of the security and legal weaknesses in the schemes. There is probity.org area devoted to openly and honestly discussing this. You are invited to express your own doubts so that we can keep everyone informed of the best way to use the schemes. No evidential system is perfect and you must decide what is best for your particular area of endeavour.

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    Where can I buy the system?

    At the moment you cannot get something that fulfills the "grand scheme" probity.org is trying to encourage. There is still a lot of work to do to strengthen the schemes to ensure evidential rigour. probity.org supports as it is able to resource its production. You are invited to investigate systems that, to a greater or lesser extent, offer registration services. If you are a such a registration service provider then probity.org would like to hear from you!

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    Isn't this just time stamping?

    Not quite. There are services fast becoming available for affixing a time stamp to your work based on the use of digests, as probity.org promotes. However, none of them are based on the principle of the widely witnessed event which probity.org favours. There are therefore problems associated with trust and the long term resilience of such services. However, time stamping services certainly have a role to play. The most well developed Internet-based IPR protection scheme available is operated by Surety Inc. However, this is not an "open" system and coupling one's IPR with another company is a matter that needs careful consideration. However, this is no worse than lodging evidence in the vault of a legal firm!

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    What can I do now to improve protection of my IPR?

    You may find the services commercially available now to be satisfactory. If not, keep on eye on this site as the schemes develop. You can use the principles now to register your IPR in your ordinary laboratory notebook. If you work in a area where securing IPR is important then you should discuss the approach with your colleagues and/or your legal people. You may like to review your laboratory notebook practices. The tools probity.org is aware of to support laboratory notebook use can be found in the software resources area.

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    My research is publically-funded and it must be published. What use is are such protection methods to me?

    You should be concerned that your ideas are recognised as yours. Even if your attitude is "publish and be damned" then you still have moral (copy)right to assert. Plagiarism is an old problem and sometimes difficult to prove. It is the very worst form of intellectual fraud. Measures should be available to protect against it and probity.org can help. Before you send a paper or contract proposal off for review it would be prudent to register it. If anything improper occurs in the review process then you will be able to show exactly what your idea was and when you had it. As electronic academic publishing develops this will be just as important.

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    I am an artist and don't use computers. Can the IPR methods you promote be any use to me?

    You have copyright and design rights to assert. If you can digitise your work somehow and register the digital version, then you are strengthening your claim. Even taking some digital photographs of your artwork or prototype and registering those will achieve something. Do not forget to save all the data files you register in a safe place so that you can regenerate your registration information! What is registered is just a characteristic fingerprint, not the full information.

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    I work in multimedia. The video and audio files I have are enormous. How can I register those?

    With no difficulty. The hashing algorithms are designed to be efficient and can generate digests from files of any size quite quickly on modern computers. The digests are the same size irrespective of the amount of source data hashed. However, be aware that they are designed to be supremely sensitive to the contents. If you change one bit of the file then the digest will be radically different. In an audio or video file such a change is not noticeable (for long) as the data formats are designed to be resilient to "drop outs". Accordingly, the difficulty will be keeping completely digitally intact the original recording so that you can regenerate the digest later. To protect against this then it is a good idea to segment the material and calculate the digests for each segment. If you have a media failure in one of the segments then you still have most of your material still protected.

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    Why is it impossible to generate the original material from its digest?

    The digest is almost always shorter than the original material being hashed. In information theory terms, the only way of being able to compress the data without losing information is to encode it i.e. exploit redundancy in the original data. Hashing explicitly does not attempt to do this, quite the opposite. It is attempting to spread the value of each bit in the original data evenly, but precisely, across all the digest bits. Since the original data will almost always be many, many times larger than the digest, both the compression (lack of bits) and the algorithm intent assures that it will be impossible to reconstruct the original data from its digest. Further issues about security are available.

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    Are there any new concepts about IPR protection here?

    Yes. There is quite a bit of "catching up" to be done throughout education and industry. Even in science and engineering disciplines the laboratory notebook has been regarded as "old fashioned" and not applicable anymore. This is not true. Further probity.org promotes use of the traditional methods of durably recording business processes of which IPR is just a part. Using a laboratory notebook or "day book" is still a valuable discipline and raising awareness will generate better availability of suitable stationery. Digests standing for digital data can be written or printed into such books as the minimum method of protection, but do not forget to keep the original data too! The full scheme probity.org promotes will come in time, but there is nothing to stop the basic notebook digest recording from happening now. Those involved in training future creative and inventive people should make the information available here known to their students.

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    What rights restrictions are associated with the probity.org schemes?

    Hopefully, none: unless you decide to use a commercial scheme which probity.org refers to. Since the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has promoted the idea of publically-available cryptosystems such as DES, there continues to be a general worldwide acceptance of the principle that cryptographic algorithms should be public (though, in the US, under the watchful eye of the US National Security Agency). Of course, they keys to such cryptosystems are not public, which is why they work! There has been parallel development of supporting algorithms called hashing algorithms (or one-way functions or message authentication codes, MACs). There are currently over 20 of these in the public domain devised by the best cryptographers in the world. probity.org does not recommend any particular algorithm but it seeks to inform users about the properties of the algorithms so an informed choice can be made.

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    Isn't "watermarking" supposed to solve the IPR protection problem?

    Yes, partly. The idea behind "watermarking" is to add some extra data to the original material which is imperceptible and cannot be easily removed. Watermarking paper is a very good analogy except that digital watermarking in not supposed to be easily detected. The technique has been of great interest to those in the publishing business where the illicit copy itself will yield the watermark which only the rights owner can have inserted. However, this does not alone enable the owner to demonstrate the existence of the original at a particular time. Other methods must be used in addition, not least the registering methods recommended by probity.org, either on the original or watermarked versions.

    The weakness of digital watermarking is that it is very difficult to make it resilient to subsequent processing (e.g. audio or video compression). Less subtle and traditional methods of "watermarking" are better, such as audible or visible "blemishes". There is a long tradition of cartographers putting deliberate mistakes in their maps!

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    Supposing I lose my original data, what then?

    You are in difficulties! Running a rigorous back-up regime is really outside the scope of probity.org recommendations since it is such an essential business requirement. Assuming that there are back-ups for the original data, suitably dispersed, consideration should be given to multiple registrations of the data. This has security problems of its own, but the benefits probably outweigh these, not least gaining resilience against the failure of the registration service(s).

    There is a more subtle means of losing the data, however. If you lose the ability to render the data into a form that is intelligible to a human, this is equivalent to losing the original data. Though you have the actual data, its meaning is irrecoverable! Very careful consideration must be given to the file formats used to embody the IPR as the readers, the programs used to render them intelligible must be available also with the data. The programs must be in provably working order. Broadcasters are already wrestling with this problem with their large archives of priceless archival material on magnetic tape for which functioning players are fast disappearing.

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    I keep a thorough laboratory notebook. What is the relevance of any new recording scheme?

    If you find your laboratory notebook scheme works fine for you then there is no reason to change it, though do check that it is rigorous. However, it is becoming very difficult to avoid having to make unambiguous reference to data that is in digital form. Examples are the outputs from analytical machinery, reports written using word processors, computer programs etc. At the very least, use of the hashing technique and recording the results in the laboratory notebook is a valuable intermediate recording technique. However, do make sure that the original data is kept intact otherwise the scheme does not work. CDROM is a very compact, accessible and cheap way of keeping such data nowadays.

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    end of faq
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