# Re: Re URNs & dead publishers

Rob Raisch, The Internet Company (raisch@internet.com)
Sun, 17 Oct 1993 19:07:28 -0700 (PDT)

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    Date: Sun, 17 Oct 1993 19:07:28 -0700 (PDT)

    From: "Rob Raisch, The Internet Company" <raisch@internet.com>

    Subject: Re: Re URNs & dead publishers

    To: Terry Allen <terry@ora.com>

    In-Reply-To: <199310180008.AA22022@rock.west.ora.com>

    Message-Id: <Pine.3.03.9310171925.B23567-c100000@hmmm.internet.com>

On Sun, 17 Oct 1993, Terry Allen wrote:

> Robert Raisch writes:
>
> > As I mentioned in private mail to Larry, I do not think that a document
> > whose publisher in no longer valid should be supported, unless that
> > document is placed in the public domain. A document without a publisher
> > (owner) cannot be guarenteed in any sense, since the guarentee of identity
> > is a function of the publisher.
>
> Unworkable. I may have an archive of material published by people who
> vanish. Am I then to throw out this material because I'm not the
> authoritative source of its meta? I grant there is a very difficult
> problem here, but this is not its solution.

Someone must be held responsible for the meta-information. I can see no
way around this. In the least case, someone must provide a mapping
between the URN and its URLs. This implies that *someone* is responsible
for this document. If its the repositories in which it resides, fine.
They must provide a service which maps the meta to the actual data.
If it is an independant, outside agency, fine. This would be the agency
which maintains the mapping between orphan documents and their meta-info
-- perhaps public domain is not the proper term, but if there is no agency
which guarentees and provides the meta-information, there can be no
guarentee that the URN is valid.

> I must have some way to verify that a document instance is the same as that
> provided by the publisher of the document. What that way is, I don't know.
> But I know I need it.

Identity must be guarenteed by some authority. No?

> I don't think public domain has anything to do with it.
> Take the model of libraries. There is no authority that provides
> ISBNs for books published before the ISBN was invented, yet they can
> still be determined to be legitimate, and may still be under
> copyright. Such books are legitimated through their publication
> characteristics (t.p. info, number of
> pages and plates, binding, dimensions), as recorded by an army of
> bibliographers over the years and published in bibliographies and
> catalogues. Detecting forgeries as opposed
> to variant editions is harder, and more a matter of connoisseurship,
> given that books are physical objects. But---here's the important
> point---it doesn't require a central authority to do this, only
> widely published information about the books concerned.

Ah ha. Then the information for each product is shared by and distributed
throughout the whole world? In the case of libraries, they guarentee the
validity of documents which are no longer owned or authorized by the
publisher. I think this is a BAD thing and should be avoided. But even
in this example, there is some authority which vouches for the document, no?

</rr>

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