Manifesto

probity.org promotes the open, public declaration of a claim of ownership. If everyone can witness your claim as it made then you should have less problem in asserting it later. Just as lottery promoters are keen to publish their results as 'widely witnessed events' to engender confidence in the rigour of their operation, you should be publishing something that signifies your work.

Of course, you do not want to publish anything substantive about your idea or design until you are ready to do so. What you must do is be able to show that you are in possession of some information which embodies your ideas or design at a particular time, the time of its inception.

probity.org promotes the principle of cryptographic "hashing" to generate a short fixed-size digest for the material you have that you want to declare. These digests are rather larger than lottery numbers, but they appear to be similarly random. They are like fingerprints, each one characterising some original material and signifying its existence.

To create digests the material must be in digital form. This is very readily achievable today, examples being word-processor documents, digital camera images, video sequences, CAD drawings or audio files. All these types of data can be compressed down to a short sequence of digits which stand for your particular, unique work. When you register this you are telling the world that you have something of significance to you which is in your possession at that particular time. No one else can generate anything similarly meaningful at the same time.

It is impossible to regenerate the original material from the hash digest. This is very important since you must not disclose your work until you are ready to demonstrate your claim of inception. All that is in the public domain is the digest of the material you have. To show that you had the material at the time the digest was made public you repeat the registration process on your original data. You stop short of doing the re-registration; you compare the hash with what was originally registered. Your claim should be believed if the digests match.

The hashing algorithm is so sensitive to your original data that it is as certain as it ever can be that you are the only person in the world that could have produced the same result at that time. Crucial to the scheme is having access to precisely the full, original data. It is vital that this is kept safely!

The hashing algorithms you will be using are among those used within the Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) for managing the certificates used for electronic signing of documents. The best cryptographers in the world have been involved in the design of these algorithms and they have been widely attested. If they are good enough for the support of e-business they should be good enough for this purpose.

probity.org encourages use the web as its means of declaring your registrations as this is the most appropriate way of creating a widely witnessed event. In the past the methods were publishing in a newspaper, journal of public record or broadcasting. Doing this makes the declaration very resilient to repudiation because there are so many disinterested witnesses. However, laboratory notebooks have long been an acceptable form of prior art evidence in IPR cases, but the evidential requirements are very stringent. Provided these are met then the digests generated can be written in a lab notebook. Even better is that they appear in both the lab notebook and in the public domain as registrations.

probity.org was indeed named on the basis of the acronym;

Public Registration On the weB of Intellectual properTY