The result is a higher quality collection of public keys, and each key has been vetted by email with the key's apparent owner.

The eight tracks of the "Pants" sequence is a multi-genre "rock opera" about a pair of pants which has no apparent owner.

Representatives of the firm located the apparent owners and began negotiating with on-line correspondents they believed to be Ivan Wong and his 18-year-old brother, Ben.

Here it is unnecessarily conservative, with no plans to make copyright clearances easier and so help "orphan" films (those with no apparent owners) become available to the public.

Charles Hecht, lawyer for the former president of and an apparent owner of Amalgamated and American Metals, Robert Maxwell, would not comment about any investigations.

"I just do this to amuse myself," he said, frowning and scribbling down the number of a car with Michigan plates and an ID card on the dashboard of its apparent owner, a New York City auxiliary police officer.

And many a pointedhelmeted vandal has trotted back to his freezing yurt wondering why he seems to be a great deal poorer and the apparent owner of a badly-woven rug, a litre of undrinkable wine and a stuffed purple donkey in a straw hat.

But the one a British officer in a hurry put to a piece of paper to get Wolski on to his staff, because Wolski had commandeered a horse and the British army needed of all things at that moment a working horse and its apparent owner.