Hopefully the ensuing conversation will raise the general level of awareness of the issues involved. Ideally we’ll be able to turn the content up and marketing-speak down….

Couple of representative links: Ars Technica’s guide on how to steal an election (scary reading), and Scott Adams’s tongue-in-cheek but thought provoking post on whether it really matters anyway (which I suspect will offend the easily offended).

James Governor’s MonkChips: digital lard for the enterprise: DRM meets document formats: “What I am saying is that DRM creates new escrow challenges, and organisations should know exactly what they are using it for, and why, and what risks they are mitigating, before embarking on an enterprise DRM strategy.”

In 1787, with the passage of the Constitution, Congress was empowered to “promote the process of science and the useful arts by securing for limited times to authors and inventors, the exclusive rights to their respective writings and discoveries.” (Article 1 § 8)

Interestingly, deploying such solutions into academia is rather different from an industrial setting, which caused us to add some additional features. The short version is “less is more”, as this environment doesn’t respond well to top-down imposition of complex systems. So we try to make PatentSafe as invisible as possible.

Well, it seems that Congress is prepared to give us a helping hand… the implications should be interesting! From InfoWorld:

Document management systems go to court | InfoWorld | Column | 2005-12-27 | By Ephraim Schwartz: “Two proposed amendments to the federal Rules of Civil Procedure, if passed by Congress, will have a major impact on corporations and their IT departments…. The two proposals are specifically targeted at electronic discovery. First, the proposed amendments to Rule 26 will require attorneys for both parties to a litigation in Federal court to sit down prior to the proceedings to discuss their clients’ document management systems….. The rule also requires each company to designate a spokesperson for its IT group.”

Here’s the full article

Nothing works more in a thief’s favor than people feeling secure. That’s why places that are heavily alarmed and guarded can sometimes be the easiest targets. The single most important factor in security - more than locks, alarms, sensors, or armed guards - is attitude. A building protected by nothing more than a cheap combination lock but inhabited by people who are alert and risk-aware is much safer than one with the world’s most sophisticated alarm system whose tenants assume they’re living in an impregnable fortress.

I get uncomfortable when I hear people placing too much faith in technology - partly because the technology often lets us down, and partly because when we trust in the technology we let our guard down. That’s why I prefer simple, boring systems for Patent Evidence. Sexy technology (like Digital Signatures, Encryption, third parties) are useful in their place, but only as part of an overall system where the system owners understand they - and only they - responsible for the system’s integrity. Also, bear in mind that a lot of the technology people think they want to use for Patent Evidence systems is actually aimed at different problems (e.g. commerce) and is potentially being misapplied for the patent area.

I was with a customer the other week and they wanted to implement a particular technique which didn’t really do much for the system’s integrity and actually made it a whole load more complicated (and expensive). “Why do you want to do this?” I ask - “Because it makes us feel comfortable” they said. Well, the customer is the ultimate arbiter (it is after all their system) so if they want it, they can have it - but me, I’d rather everyone involved in running this system felt very uncomfortable because then they’ll keep an eye on it.

Sometimes to be “safe” you have to feel unsafe. Only the paranoid survive etc.