Dean Wilson@UnixDaemon: ... It's not even close to relevant.

Tue, 15 Jan 2008

Proof of Ownership and Third Party Escrow
I own a lot of old comics, piles of DVDs and a somewhat smaller (but still decent size stack) of audio CDs. These take up a lot of physical space, the comics decrease in quality, they all attract dust and are a pain to dig through when I want to find that one song on a compilation CD from 2002. Or was it 2001?

I have a lot of data - iso images and virtual machines are among the biggest disk eaters. A large percentage of it sits on a number of small external hard drives that are cheap, easy to upgrade (buy a bigger one, run an rsync and done) and simple to take offsite.

I'd love to use the latter to solve the former - I'd happily buy two 500GB drives (dirt cheap) rip redundant FLAC and MP3 copies of a number of my CDs (and scan / rip everything else) and then dispose of them to get a shelf back but how do I then prove everything is legit when something crops up and I have to display the fact I paid for them? Amazon orders? Credit card receipts? With the grossly inflated fines being levelled in the US I'd be bankrupted if I couldn't prove I did buy the soundtrack to Finding Nemo (although the fine might be less painful than having it in the public record that I did - it was a present, honest!)

So where are the companies offering indemnity, escrow and proof of legitimate ownership? Why can't I tick a "remember I bought this" button on Amazon and know that they've got my back? (as well as my VMs, online storage and book purchasing history?) Is this impossible to do? Is there no market for it? Where am I going to put that next order from Play when it turns up...

It could even be a way to recover things you've lost, they'd have the proof that you owned it and it'd cost them practically nothing to issue you another copy. As much as I love CSI, Buffy and Stargate I want my floor space back.

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Posted: 2008/01/15 19:28 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date

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