The paper concerns a practical method for trusted timestamping of metadata on the Ethereum blockchain, for metadata preservation and the copyright protection of digital documents. A week before the conference, the code of the method was released as free software (GPL v3) in the repository timestamping-metadata-using-blockchain. It includes Python scripts that create the transaction on the Ethereum main network or on a test network, with the complete metadata record and the hash of the document, and scripts for retrieving and verifying it. The scripts are already populated with the metadata of a composer’s digital score, so that the method can be tested with the same example.
Presentation. The paper was presented at the Metadata and Semantic Research conference (MTSR 2019), at Guglielmo Marconi University in Rome, on Tuesday 29 October 2019, in the track on metadata, identifiers and semantics in decentralized applications, blockchains and P2P systems. The text was published in the conference volume in Springer’s Communications in Computer and Information Science series (vol. 1057).