How can one establish authorship of content?
For a startup creating content for syndication, what is an effective way to establish that the content was indeed created by the startup and not those receiving it?
For example, one could print out or burn the content and mail it to oneself, storing the postmarked enveloped unopened. But with a constantly growing library of content, this becomes too impractical.
An wayback machine such as archive.org would work for public webpages, but this content is stored in a database and is not to be accessible publicly.
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The envelope idea may work.. but what is your actual goal? – Casey Software 12 years ago
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The goal is to minimize the chance of the content being on-sold. – Jontyc 12 years ago
2 Answers
Why not use version control? Git, mercurial, subversion can be used. Or you could go with a document repository model like what california digital library uses. Or alfresco or other document management systems. All can establish origin.
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I guess I could create database dump files and version control them on a public repository like GitHub or BitBucket. Such public repositories should be good enough to establish origin. Hopefully the version deltas aren't unnecessarily huge. – Jontyc 12 years ago
A very techie response would be to create a time sensitive salt ideally by a third party (so they hold the salt and the authenticity of the salt) which is then used to hash the entire content which is then stored on another third party. In effect you then have a system if their is any doubt you simply retrieve the salt from third party 1 and the hash from party 2 and then hash the disputed content and see if it matches. This obviously will only work for unmodified work.
Not sure the practicalities would be and you are reliant on multiple custodians, but would be more scalable and assuming the independence of the third parties possibly more reliable then mailing yourself.
