Crowd validated internet document witnessing system

• US 8,713,692 B2
• Filed: 04/01/2012
• Issued: 04/29/2014
• Est. Priority Date: 04/01/2012
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Richard Lamb
• Original Assignee: Richard Lamb
• Inventors: Lamb, Richard
• Primary Examiner(s): Mehedi, Morshed
• Assistant Examiner(s): CHANG, KENNETH W
• Application Number:
  US13/436,947
• Publication Number:
  US 20130263274A1
• Time in Patent Office: 758 Days
• Field of Search: 726/26
• US Class Current: 726/26
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 21/10 Protecting distributed programs or content, e.g. vending or licensing of copyrighted material protection in video systems or pay television H04N7/16 ; Digital rights management [DRM]
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 21/645 using a third party
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 63/12 Applying verification of the received information cryptographic mechanisms or cryptographic arrangements for data integrity or data verification H04L9/32
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 67/02 based on web technology, e.g. hypertext transfer protocol [HTTP]
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 9/40 Network security protocols

Abstract

A system and method that accepts material from the Internet, computes and maintains a computationally unique representation of the received material in a database, computes a computationally unique representation of the updated database state as a whole, publishes material and database representations in various forms for the global Internet audience to witness, and returns a time stamped attestation to the submitter of material as proof of the material being witnessed on the Internet along with unique database state and revenue generating advertisements. Published representations may include pictures, common words, or hexadecimal character string to facilitate Internet searching mechanisms.

Claims

1. An automated method for attesting to publication of digital content, including but not limited to documents, email, web pages, images, video, or software, on a public Internet, comprising the steps of:

providing for author generation of digital content;

receiving the digital content via the public Internet;

calculating a cryptographic hash of the received digital content;

storing the cryptographic hash, ancillary author information, time of reception, and a cryptographic hash of an overall database into the database if the cryptographic hash of the digital content and the ancillary author information do not already exist in the database;

transmitting response information via the public Internet to an author indicating a time at which the digital content was received, ancillary author information, cryptographic hash of the digital content, cryptographic hash of the overall database after inclusion of author content, and an Internet address where the author may retrieve the response information in downloadable document form;

transmitting a response via the public Internet to the author including an attestation that the received digital content has already been seen with a time at which the digital content was received, ancillary original author information, cryptographic hash of the digital content, cryptographic hash of the overall database after inclusion of original author content, and an Internet address where the attestation is downloadable in permanent document form;

publishing at recurring times a current database hash and cryptographic hash of last received digital content on the public Internet for capture by one or more search engines;

detecting the capture by the one or more search engines of the current database hash and the cryptographic hash of the received digital content to generate proof of content publication via cryptographic audit trail; and

digitally signing both of the response information in downloadable document form and the attestation in downloadable permanent document form to provide protection against modification.

2. The method of claim 1, further comprising representing the current database hash as a picture either digitally created or linked to existing digitized images.

3. The method of claim 1, further comprising hashing the ancillary author information and ancillary original author information to address privacy concerns.

4. The method of claim 1, wherein the reception of the digital content and the transmission of the response is any combination of e-mail, web page, secured e-mail, or secured web page.

5. The method of claim 1, further comprising cryptographically validating the ancillary author information, including an e-mail email address, via at least one of digitally signed e-mail and client side authenticated web connections.