[Savannah-hackers] [ 100992 ] Prior art database

[nobody]

Support Request #100992, was updated on 2002-Jun-10 14:34
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Category: CVS
Status: Open
Priority: 3
Summary: Prior art database

By: loic
Date: 2002-Jun-11 09:19

Message:
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This is indeed an interesting approach. The nice part is
that it can be done by any third party since the CVS trees
are available via rsync. Someone can mirror all the CVS
trees, compute and publish the MD5SUM as you suggested.
Publication in a newspaper may not be necessary: a big list
can be deposited together with the matching CVS version
numbers at a lawyer office (in France, a notary can do that
for a reasonable price). 

Would you be willing to provide this service ? It could be
done every month or every six months.

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By: savannah
Date: 2002-Jun-10 14:34

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Hi Savannah.

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 md5sum into a file
* md5sum this file
* publish the md5sum in a printed newspaper
* store the file with md5sums 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 the
file with md5sums did indeed exist at the time of
publishing. And with the
file with md5sums it should be possble to prove in
court that the file in
question did indeed exist before the time of publishing.



/Ole


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