POE (Proof Of Existence) is a very interesting – if slightly complicated – subject, which comes in connection with IP protection (protecting one’s Intellectual Property from theft). For most of my family, friends and acquaintances, IP means music, song lyrics, and/or poetry. For me, that extends to creative writing, technical inventions, software, business ideas, and more.
When I was younger, I went the conventional route which included registering every single one of my 150+ songs with the Library of Congress, and registering one of my many inventions with the U.S. Patent Office. While the Library of Congress can still be useful, it’s gotten too expensive as time has progressed, because now they limit how many songs you can register at once. And for those – like most musicians – who complete one song at a time to release as ‘singles’, that copyright protection becomes even more expensive.
Steemit
In 2017, in the wake of not only these changes with conventional copyrighting, but also with the rise of blockchain technology in general, I came up with my own alternative copyrighting method, based on the POE method I had recently read about. A couple companies were charging customers to use their system, and I simply came up with a way to do the same thing but for free. Instead of creating my own blockchain (difficult and time consuming), I decided to use the already-existing Steemit system (which uses the Steem blockchain). Not only was it free to use, it also already had a great and easy-to-use interface that would allow anyone and everyone to make a post, in just a few minutes.
After making my first post (a short bio), I realized the deeper implications of their system and of the blockchain as a distributed ledger. For those of you who don’t know much about blockchain tech, it’s the distributed ledger and anti-hacker tech that makes it so unique – and so powerful. If thousands of people have the same digital ledger that all show the same millions of transactions, it means that such a ledger would be nearly impossible to falsely modify (because you’d have thousands of people who can provide proof of the misdeed, simply by showing their copy of the ledger). Nobody can ‘cook the books’, if everyone has a copy of the book!
To find our more about how this works in the realm of copyrighting music, lyrics, etc., please read on (from this point onward, the post is copied word-for-word from my 2017 white paper).
Copyrighting and the Trusted Timestamp
From the viewpoint of a highly productive content creator, I was very excited when I first heard about the concept of POE (Proof Of Existence), or what might be called ‘blockchain copyrighting’: the quick-and-free method of protecting IP (Intellectual Property) via blockchain technology. As it stands now, I see the Trusted Timestamp as the initial component of this progressing movement, and although the Trusted Timestamp is a less-than-perfect implementation of IP protection, it is nonetheless a very useful tool for any creator who wants to take quick-and-free 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 hash (a short string of text which is a mathematical representation of your document, or whatever file you’re interested in protecting). The blockchain you submitted to will distribute your hash on its ledger, along with a timestamp of when you submitted it. This information is unchangeable, due to the ‘magic’ of the distributed ledger – and your document is now ‘protected’ using this unalterable nature of the blockchain (some caveats apply, as you’ll see below…).
A 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, USPTO, etc. (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 $10,000 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 import your document or file that you want to protect (including an mp3 or wav song file), 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 ‘POE’ or ‘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, together with a copy of the protected document in the same folder (I do this because I often modify files after doing my POE, and the modified file would not produce the same hash…).
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!
Privacy
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 relatively short number/letter string (usually 256 characters) 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.
This ‘document invisibility’ is just one of the extremely useful properties of the hash method. Yet that same hash ‘proves’ the existence of that version of your file, simply due to the complexities of hash generation. And the time-stamp ‘proves’ your version of that file existed on that day. This can conceivably be used in an IP court case to indicate document ownership, since any other party would be extremely hard-pressed to show a trusted time-stamp of an earlier date, with the same hash (or with the hash of a similar-enough document).
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).
Protection
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 the earliest date, hence with 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 principal 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, and post a POE earlier than you. For this reason, it can be seen that this is not a perfect protection scheme. However, it’s very good, very fast – and it’s free!
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 most types of Intellectual Property (particularly those types of content that are text-based).
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 development as at least a somewhat useful tool that the average thrifty man or woman might use to add an extra layer of protection over their deftly designed data, especially as a prelude to exposing your idea for others to see.
Links:
Winhasher (hash generation software):
https://github.com/gpfjeff/winhasher
Steemit Blockchain:
https://steemit.com/trending/my
My POE posts: