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[ASTH]

Does anyone know of a free server that can be used for trusted time-stamping?

It would need to be able to time-stamp document files (doc, html, pdf) prior to publication so that their proof of being in existence at that time can be used if necessary in any future copyright disputes. Ideally it would be ANSI ASC X9.95 compliant.

I've gone through the search engines as best I can and found a couple of commercial ones, and a couple of free ones (especially écrive .net which was mentioned on Wikipedia but it doesn't come with any information on its site about the standards it adheres to and so its not clear if anything it stamps carries much weight).

I get the impression that there are a lot of such free servers (they seem mostly be used though to time-stamp code), but that they are  just not easy to find unless you know what you are looking for.

So I was wondering if anyone on here ever uses such a service? A commercial service would be OK so long as it charged by the stamp. There are not many documents that need stamping which rules out the large commercial solutions.

Thanks if anyone has any advice on this, or if anyone can recommend somewhere else to look.

[lj2shoes]

I use a commercial service that offers some free trusted timestamps with registration and sells small packets -- maybe that would be a good solution for you?  It is called Easytimestamping.com.  It's the only one I've found that really works, without much fuss.

[JSonnabend]

Why not just file for copyright registration?

[MYK]

I wonder if emailing a document to yourself, using one of the many free web email services, would work.

Google's GMail keeps everything you send in a "sent mail" folder, and the header contains the time and date at which the email was sent.

However, a negative point is that there is something decidedly weird about how they display the time a message was sent/received.  They seem to pull your own computer's clock and to use that somehow.  I sometimes get shown messages that are "timestamped" several hours in the future, and I think it's because they assume my computer's clock is in my local timezone rather than set to GMT (Linux leaves the computer's hardware clock on GMT and adjusts what it displays based on the timezone (and DST setting) you tell the system to use;  Microsoft changes the computer's hardware clock to whatever the local timezone is, including DST adjustments;  GMail is apparently not sophisticated enough to handle such differences, or perhaps it is but cannot compensate when a computer is set up to dual-boot and doesn't necessarily follow the "correct" OS convention).

I don't know if, internally, GMail uses the correct time from their own servers, which presumably have a time-correction daemon that checks the USNO Tycho master clock.