Re: registering a composition

[David Wright]

On Sat 23 May 2020 at 23:35:10 (+0200), Hans Åberg wrote:
> > On 23 May 2020, at 23:00, antlists <address@hidden> wrote:
> > On 23/05/2020 20:21, Valentin Villenave wrote:
> >> I’m not saying the world is a nice place (it isn’t); you should, at
> >> the very least, secure*your*  copyright by having a solid proof of
> >> anteriority, as we discussed.  What I’m saying is that you shouldn’t
> >> overestimate the possible threat to your work if you were to publish
> >> it freely, nor the amount and quality of “protection” you’ll get from
> >> any RMO out there.
> > 
> > for the sake of a few pennies, there's an easy way to prove the date. Used, 
> > I believe, by some law firm in America for its legal documents, and easy 
> > enough to do here in England too.
> > 
> > Put all of your stuff on a CD. Now run a program that generates an MD5 
> > checksum or whatever it is, and save both the command and output to a text 
> > file. (I'd throw in a listing of the CD too.) Print this, as an advert, in 
> > a legal newspaper such as - in London - Lloyds Gazette.
> > 
> > That CD can now be copied freely, the MD5 sum won't change. And the advert 
> > proves that it was in existence on the date of the newspaper. You don't 
> > even need to save a copy of the newspaper - the fact that it is a newspaper 
> > of legal announcements means that there will be loads of copies kept, 
> > probably a lot of them by courts themselves!
> 
> Don’t use MD5 though, as it is not considered secure. SHA-256 and SHA-512 are 
> better.

Yes, not cyptographically secure. But that's not the threat model, is it?

So, I carefully craft a document whose MD5 digest matches the musical
work. What shall I do? I've either created another work that the real
owner can pass of as theirs, depriving me of the benefit, or I've
created a confession of past crimes, which I can hand to the police
so that the owner, my rival composer, gets locked up.

They don't seem very likely scenarios.

However, I don't expect it to cost many more pennies to publish
several digests.

Cheers,
David.