From the viewpoint of a highly productive content creator I was very excited when I first heard about the concept of what might be called ‘blockchain copyrighting’, which is the attempted protection of IP (Intellectual Property) via blockchain technology. As it stands now, I see the Trusted Timestamp as the initial and incomplete component of this progressing movement, and although this is a far less-than-perfect implementation of IP protection, it is nonetheless a free and currently available tool for any creator who wants to take at least minimal precautions with their work before disseminating it to the masses (or to professionals in their field, etc.).
For those who are not aware of what the Trusted Timestamp is, let’s go ahead and dive in. A Trusted Timestamp is a very small submission to any blockchain, of a short text string which is a mathematical representation of your document (whatever document you’re interested in protecting). The blockchain you submitted to will then contain your short string (called a ‘hash’), along with a timestamp of when you submitted it. This information is unchangeable, due to the ‘magic’ that is blockchain technology – and your document is now at least a little more ‘protected’ using this unalterable nature of blockchains in general (some caveats apply, as you’ll see below...).
Here’s a brief example of what might be considered a typical use case:
Say you have authored a document that contains some creative material – it can be a poem, a song, a story or the detailed explanation of an invention, or any other creative idea any person might have. You want to protect that document from IP theft, but don’t yet know if it’s worth the often very high investment of conventional protection via the Library of Congress or other means (the theft of Intellectual Property is not a myth, after all – a good example would be the telephone, an idea originally created by an unheard-of inventor who died alone and penniless at what must have been a very bitter end). For instance, obtaining a patent for an invention via the U.S. patent office can cost between $1,000 and $50,000 dollars, depending on legal fees and project complexities – amounts that are completely beyond the reach of the average basement innovator.
Now your friend (me!) tells you about this new thing called a Trusted Timestamp, which could be implemented using any blockchain. He tells you that although most blockchains have financial costs associated with timestamping, the Steem blockchain is completely free for the user (for instance, the cost of timestamping via the Bitcoin blockchain costs between one Satoshi to two MilliBits – or roughly $16 for the implementation that I first investigated).
He (me) says that all you have to do to obtain a free Trusted Timestamp is to create a ‘hash’ of your document (easy enough via free online tools, or better yet via freely downloadable shareware tools such as Winhasher). In this instance, you would simply open any hash-generation software on your computer, use the ‘open’ command to open your document that you want to protect, select the ‘hash algorithm’ you want to use (most people say that SHA256 is the best), and click ‘generate hash’. Copy the generated hash to your computer’s clipboard (by highlighting the hash – which is just an alphanumeric string less than one line long – and selecting ‘copy’ in the menu).
You would then open a Steemit post window, and paste the hash into the main text window, along with a title and any text that will help you remember which document you’d like to protect (you can protect more than one document per post. Because a hash is only one line of text, you could protect perhaps a hundred documents in a single post!). You would then type ‘copyrighting’ or ‘Timestamping’ or some such word in the ‘tags’ field.
The next step would be to open any text software (Word, Notepad, etc.) and paste the hash into the document, along with a description of the document you used to create the hash, and the specific algorithm you used. You should save the text document in a convenient place on your hard drive, perhaps with a copy of the protected document in the same folder.
The final step would be to click ‘Post’ to submit your Steemit post to the Steem blockchain, then to check that the post was successful.
And that’s it – you’ve just discovered how to create your first Trusted Timestamp!
Now keep in mind that – within the context of the aforementioned scenario – your document has not been uploaded anywhere; it’s still perfectly safe in your computer. All you have uploaded is a cryptographically generated number/letter string which was generated using your document as the input. The number string is far too small to contain any of your actual Intellectual Property (your innovative idea), so you’re in no danger of having your idea stolen and extracted from the hash. It has been deemed absolutely impossible by armies of mathematicians and cryptographers!
This ‘document invisibility’ is just one of the extremely useful properties of the hash method.
The other extremely useful property is that, because the hash is generated from your document using a mathematical algorithm, it can be re-generated any time using the same algorithm, and the resulting hash will be exactly the same. For this reason, a hash can be used to verify that the document that was used to generate the first hash is exactly the same document that generated the second hash (providing the same algorithm is used, and those algorithms are widely known).
The idea here is that if you think a person stole your creative concept (whatever that concept might be), you can theoretically take that person to court and challenge them to provide a date of inception for the idea, and to prove it using any method they like (such as a patent, copyright, or Trusted Timestamp). If they fail to provide any evidence, or if they provide evidence that includes a date which is later than the date on your own Trusted Timestamp (which is the most likely scenario, particularly if they did steal your work), then you would simply provide the court with your original document, along with the location of your Trusted Timestamp (which any online computer can access by connecting to the Steemit blockchain). The court would then use your document, along with whichever algorithm you used to generate your original hash, to re-generate the hash. As the new hash would be identical to the original hash that is on the blockchain, the court would be forced – by undeniable mathematical logic – to conclude that your Trusted Timestamp is accurate and authentic, and – assuming that the same cannot be said of the opposing party – the court would then award you with authorship of the document, hence creation of the idea (until/unless another party can provide an earlier Trusted Timestamp, which would also need to be verified using whatever document they are in possession of).
So, as you can now see, only the person who holds the original document with which the original hash string was generated will be able to produce that same document for later inspection, since the document cannot be re-created by the hash (only the inverse is true – only the hash can be re-created by the document).
The principle caveat of this entire method is that this would not save someone who is a victim of breaking-and-entering, or of hardcore hacking, or of any unsavory method that might allow such a person to obtain your original document. For this reason, it can be seen that this is not a perfect protection scheme.
But in most cases – since, fortunately, burglary and deep hacking are rare – this will provide a free tool which at the very least could be used as one layer of potential protection for any type of Intellectual Property that is textual in nature.
The other caveat – perhaps equally important – is that courts, and the law itself, are themselves not perfect and indeed very corruptible, which means that there is absolutely no certainty whatsoever that this protection scheme will ever be allowed by what has wisely been called ‘the powers that shouldn’t be’.
Be that as it may, we can nonetheless see this cryptographic development as at least a somewhat useful tool that the average thrifty man or woman might use to add an extra layer of protection – and a free one at that – over their deftly designed idea, especially as a prelude to uncovering said idea for others to see.
And to complete this post in the most appropriate way possible, I’ll now include my own first hash right here, so that I’ll be able to use this very post as a Trusted Timestamp for a creative idea I had a few days ago (in the field of electronics).
Here's the hash that I generated from that design document:
0D734DA80EB1CA4141065E9B75030D3FC75B2EE245066679B96CE8351153171E
And as I am a copious content creator you should be seeing many more of these now-not-so-strange strings (say that 6 times fast!) in my Steemit posts in what I hope are the many multitudinous days to come...