No Subject

  Hal Finney wrote:

> I'm not sure how to do it for software, but for novels it
> should be easy to fingerprint.  Every couple of pages the
> author writes a sentence twice in different forms.  This would
> not take a great deal of extra effort on the part of the
> author.

  Perhaps.  Some authors might be offended by the idea that
using a different form of a sentence doesn't affect the work.

> Perhaps a similar approach could be applied to software, where
> in many cases a couple of statements could be trivially
> interchanged, or other kinds of simple transformations could
> be manually generated.  Those could be marked by the
> programmers without too much extra work.

  Sounds like a disaster to me, unless it can be done
automatically, by a proven-correct program.  I used to use
commercial compilers that (at least claimed to) put their
"stamp" on the assembly code they generated, so they could sue
if you released a product without having a license for the
compiler.  Bugs are bad enough as it is; we don't need extra
ones that only show up in some copies!


Will French  <wfrench@interport.net>