The Codel Document Protection Software will prompt authors or owners of documents to formalise the claims they are making in respect of a given document. The nature of these claims can remain private or be made public as it suits the author. Codel, however, is not interested in what the claims may be. All it requires - for the author/owner's protection - is a single hash which represents the any and all the claims being made.
The claims we have provided for are the following:
Authorship - the user is claiming to be the document's creator and any rights that go with that.
Ownership - the user is not the author, but has legitimately obtained the rights to the document.
Date of Transfer of Ownership - when, for example, an author sells a document to a 3rd party, the rights to the document may be sold with the document. The Codel system allows Authors to make such transfers painlessly and anonymously (we don't even need to know that ownership has changed). All that is required is a change of one time key created by the software when the document was initially registered. The author gives their one time key to the new owner and the new owner uses it to replace the relevant Codel hash with a new one representing their new one time key. Typically the new owner will also modify the claims to reflect the change of ownership. The hashes for the new claim and the new key are automatically uploaded by the Codel software.
Date of Origin - Codel automatically records date of submission and we can validate that with mathematical certainty providing our audit trail protection is not broken. However, for whatever reason, the submitter may be registering their document many months after it was created. They may wish to include a claim in regard to the date of creation. Codel cannot, of course, verify that data - but it can verify that the claim was made.
Content - this is a freeform area where authors can make specific claims in regard to content. A Sci-fi author, for example, might want to place on record that their new story is the first time any one has dealt with the issue of Robots having democratic rights, or that Satellites might form a useful means of enhancing global communications. A travel company might wish to register their claim that theirs is the first itinerary offering 2 days living with Bonobos in the Republic of Congo. A UFOlogist might wish to register the claim that the photograph contains evidence of an alien artifact. And so on.
Other - another freeform area where authors or owners may place any other details or comments regarding the document which they feel could have some importance in any future challenges to the document. This might include, for example, details about how the document was created, how the information was obtained, how the image was captured etc.
Should an author/owner subsequently need to substantiate all or part of their claims to a document, all they need to do is submit the claims to the challenger and the challenger can verify for themselves that the claims were indeed registered at the claimed time.
If the author owner wishes to prove also that they must have been the source of the document and its claims, the software initiates a challenge/response session with Codel which results in Codel sending a "certificate of origin" to the email of the author's choice. Only the author can pass the challenge/response test because only they possess the relevant one time key. The one time key is replaced with a new one during the procedure. This flowchart illustrates the process.
