Physical Rights Management

While the advent of auto-fabricators and auto-factories has democratized the production of many goods in the Cobalt Protectorate, there remain a few classes of products too complex to manufacture in the home, too safety-critical or exacting in their construction to accept anything but close quality control supervision, too much the product of unusual manufacturing conditions to be made through mass-market auto-fabricators, or too new to have suitable auto-fabricator blueprints available for licensing. Medical devices, for example, often fall into more than one of these categories. There are items which gain their value not from any intrinsic utility, but rather from their rarity, antiquity, or proximity to important people and events. HLAI hardware - as identifiable as a human's unique DNA - is an example of this sort of item. Furthermore, there are objects which might need to have a well-established chain of custody or providence of source to maintain their value to the owner, such as containers for scientific samples, items of evidence for criminal cases, or important documents like vitreous vitae. For these reasons, physical rights management (PRM) techniques - an extension of the digital rights management philosophy to objects in the physical world - constitute an ever-evolving branch of Evermornan technology.

Manufacturing

Physical rights management is less a technique than a constellation of interrelated techniques which, when used in combination, serve to uphold the provenance of a manufactured item or container. For example, a manufacturer might produce a limited-edition item in a container made of noble glass encoded with an identity code which is unique by dint of being the product of large primes, but they might also dope the glass with particular isotopes in particular ratios which would be otherwise difficult for a counterfeiter to replicate and which decay at a set rate to indicate roughly when the original container was manufactured. Unique and very difficult to crack locking mechanisms might be employed to ensure that only the intended recipient can open the container. PRM schemes are typically treated as trade secrets and closely guarded by those who employ them, and an entire secondary market of information security solutions tailored to this information exists.

Social Impact

In a world where practically anything one's heart could desire can be generated through the machination of robots and algorithms, the veracity of what's 'real' and who owns it provided by PRM techniques is a great comfort to many Evermornans who embrace their culture's traditional mindset. For manufacturers, especially those involved in the production of specialized goods, PRM provides an avenue for maintaining profits in the face of advancements in autonomous manufacturing systems owned by the customers themselves. PRM is also important for collectors and antiquities markets less because of techniques applied to the objects themselves than to display cases and containers in which they are stored. PRM technologies also have a political dimension, as techniques developed as part of PRM can also be applied to important governmental records, secure communications equipment, and other items of state.

Parent Technologies

• Auto-Factory