Examples

Below is how the status of a registered document can be confirmed by the recipient. Here Party B wants to be assured that what they have is what Party A created at the time they created it. This will also probably be the time that Party B got a copy, typically by download via a web transaction.

Good practice would be that Party A uses another channel to deliver the registration receipt for the document. Party B can then be comfortable that the document is what Party A wanted them to receive and base further decisions upon. It could be a financial statement, annual report, contract or executable program.

Having the receipt with a third party registration service assures Party B that Party A stands by what is in the document and will not retract it without having to give further notice and going through the process again, potentially with a lot of other relying parties.

The document can be confirmed to be exactly what Party A wished Party B to rely on: the document content cannot have been tampered with unless some other party adequately masquerades as Party A.

Below is how commercial-in-confidence information can be registered as would be required to demonstrate 'diligence' in a prior-art patent dispute. Though not necessary, here we show an internal registration server that aggregates registrations from many internal sources. Periodically, it closes its own log segments and files with external registration servers. It operates just like a public registration server but, because it does not follow the 'open declaration' model, it cannot be trusted as much.

Whether internal registration server are used or not, all that appears in the public domain is registrations containing digest hashes. Only if the registration source decides to publish the documents in an intelligible fashion will anything concerning the registrations become known.

Below is an example from a laboratory notebook. At the top of the page is printout from a short file securely affixed to the page. The contents of this file were themselves hashed using MD5. The result was written by hand into the lab book. It is easier and less error-prone to print the hash and then securely affix this to the page.

Today, MD5 is deprecated as a hash algorithm. In 1999, when it was used here, no compromises were known. Provided the time and context of use is not in doubt, the evidence shown here should still be robust.