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Subject: discussion of the Creative Commons Metadata work

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  • From: Andrea Glorioso <sama AT miu-ft.org>
  • To: discussion of the Creative Commons Metadata work <cc-metadata AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: taggers
  • Date: Fri, 09 Jul 2004 20:49:01 +0200

>>>>> "Ryan" == Ryan Shaw <ryanshaw AT sims.berkeley.edu> writes:

> Can you explain this a bit more? How would a search agent be
> able to check whether a given file truly contained CC-licensed
> content?

In Italy we have an authority, called CNIPA. Any party (well, there
are some prerequisites, of course) can register with CNIPA as a
"registrar" and be able to issue cryptographical signing and
timestamping services. Registration with CNIPA only guaranteers legal
liability, it doesn't impact at all on the technicalities.

What you can do is produce a hash [0] of your digital work and ask one
of the above mentioned registered parties to sign it and timestamp it.
This is equivalent to saying "author A did create work X on time T".

At that point, verifying whether a file you download is by author X or
by author Y is trivial (in the mathematical sense of the word); adding
the licensing information to the above scheme is trival, too (same
sense).

One thing I forgot to say in my previous e-mail is that this scheme is
completely orthogonal to the problem at hand. :) In other words, this
mechanism only proves the relationship between author, work, time, and
optionally metadata; it doesn't create a direct relationship between
data and metadata.

On the other hand, I don't see (easy) ways to create such a
relationship without a trusted third party (or a web of trusted web
parties like PGP does [1]).

OR you can go down the TCPA/Palladium route (Trusted Computing and all
that stuff). I don't want to go down that route, so I'm trying to
check other possibilities.

If anything I wrote is confusing, feel free to tell me.

Bye,

--
Andrea Glorioso sama AT miu-ft.org +39 333 820 5723
.:: Media Innovation Unit - Firenze Tecnologia ::.
Conquering the world for fun and profit

[0] A hash is a function which produces a (usually) fixed length
number from the pot of bytes that your file is composed of. Good
hashing functions (SHA-1, MD5, etc, etc) are guaranteed to produce
different results for different files (or, the possibility to have
the same hash for two different files is so low as to be
negligible).

[1] Actually I'm still wondering whether a "web of trust" or a "tree
of trust" is the best route to go for my project.




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