I want to share with you an interesting story about information sharing, copyrights, artistic control and lockpicking. Long ago I wrote the MIT Guide To Lockpicking, and wanted to limit its distribution (for reasons that are no longer apparent). I decided to delete the electronic forms, and just allow the distribution of hardcopy. That worked for many, many years. Over the summer, I started taking steps to publish the Guide electronically, but I was beaten to the punch-line by some cyberpunks who scanned it in, and posted it. On the whole I don't mind, since I was planning to publish it anyways, but it does feel wrong that as the author of this work I do not have any say over its distribution anymore. The copyright notice in the Guide says that it can be feely distributed, but at the time, that meant hardcopy form, because scanners were too expensive for anyone to be likely to scan in the guide, and the printers had not reached any standard for expressing pictures. Thus, the original copyright notice did what I wanted. As technology changed, the term "feely" came to mean "very feely in any form". Oh well. Is there any crypto technology that would allow an author to control derivative works based on something that has been published on the network as a postscript file, or a latex source file? I know that a worked could be signed to indicate that it is "authorized", but can any more be achieved? For your information, I have attached the posting announcement I sent to the alt.locksmithing. Hopefully someone will place the Guide in an FTP site soon (any volunteers from soda?), as I do not want to be sending out email copies. By the way, having a pseudonym to carry out correspondence as "Ted The Tool" was an enabling technology for me to post the Guide, and to request cooperation on producing the next revision. Thank you for creating this technology. Sincerely, Ted The Tool ------------------------------------------------------------------------- To find out more about the anon service, send mail to help@anon.penet.fi. Due to the double-blind, any mail replies to this message will be anonymized, and an anonymous id will be allocated automatically. You have been warned. Please report any problems, inappropriate use etc. to admin@anon.penet.fi.