I thought ownership was a matter of signing a transaction with the Datacoin client, which should be possible in 0.16.
It can be interpreted as such but there's no software support enforcing it (i.e. you can sign any tx but to what effect?) The semantics of the interpretation remains a purely social understanding. Signing a tx doesn't have any inherent meaning as far as the client is concerned.I would remember that you can already take the ownership of an asset on Datacoin blockchain with ByteStamp Digital Assets.
Here is the tutorial:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqu0syu9Qtc
and here you can download the windows app:
https://blockchain.bytestamp.net
When you take the ownership of an asset, it writes to blockchain the ByteStampMD5 of the file and the sign of the Address that becomes the owner.
And when the owner transfers an asset to another address, it writes in blockchain that the previous owner has transferred the ownership to another address.
Anybody can read in the Datacoin blockchain that the transfer of the asset was signed by the address that was the previous owner.
Each ByteStamp Digital Asset transaction has an hash that is inserted in the next one transaction, thus creating another blockchain of digital assets that relies on Datacoin blockchain.
All the process is open and verifiable by third parties.
For example, you can read the transaction id 76fbe121399d0b2fd62ee151d7bba079400b0d246fe8cb219407778600689c79
(https://www2.bytestamp.net/blocks/qtx/it/76fbe121399d0b2fd62ee151d7bba079400b0d246fe8cb219407778600689c79)
that transfer an asset from a Datacoin Address to a Bitcoin Address (yes, we can transfer across different wallets types
)In this way you can transfer each type of file (music, image, video, spreadsheet,...) as like as you transfer bitcoins or datacoins, because each file can become a crypto asset.