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Would artificial scarcity via fingerprinting (e.g. a unique hash to establish authenticity of ownership) per electronic copy help or hinder digital good resales?

I would support a token/watermark that proves authenticity of ownership, but can see where other more militant may say that this feels like a form of DRM (albeit without actual encryption or restrictions beyond the inclusion of the nonce to generate a unique signature).

In practice and within today's environment the idea of fingerprinting would be silly because it would be relatively easy to produce an unmarked copy, as is already the case with DRM protected .MOBI or .EPUB formats anyway.



Unless the fingerprint could be updated upon resale (how?) it wouldn't prove much. Fingerprinting also doesn't seem to deter reselling multiple copies unless all the buyers cooperate.


Cryptoprotocol could allow for this.




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