Important to note first: copyright does not arise through registration. A creative human work is protected as soon as it is created.
In practice, however, another question often arises: how can one prove later on that a particular file already existed at a specific point in time and could be attributed to a particular person or organisation? This is where MyCopyright, the new service from ProLitteris, comes in.
MyCopyright is aimed at authors, visual artists, publishing houses and other rights holders. It is suitable, for example, for manuscripts before they are sent to publishing houses, for synopses and screenplays, for authentic press photographs, for series of artistic works, for illustrations, concepts, academic texts, product images, marketing material, audiovisual files or code. What matters is not the content category, but the file as a digital object.
MyCopyright can help whenever you anticipate needing to provide evidence at a later date.
During the sealing process, ProLitteris links the file to a digital fingerprint and a specific time stamp. Upon deposit, it is also stored in a secure repository. From this point onwards, a certificate documenting the file’s existence and the time of its secure storage is available at any time.
MyCopyright does not replace legal considerations or an assessment of whether someone has a claim to a work (copyright) or could assert other intellectual property rights. However, MyCopyright provides clearly defined evidence for future legal matters or negotiations.
ProLitteris is launching a service developed by the Swiss IT company ‘Swiss Trust Layer’ in collaboration with other partners (including Swisscom). The initial functions are sealing and depositing. Further functions, in particular declarations of human authorship (‘Human Authored’) and additional verification or clarification steps, will follow later. In this way, ProLitteris makes a clear distinction between the technical verification of a file and its subsequent legal or content-related classification.
There is no obligation for authors and publishing houses to use the service. The practical benefits are obvious: anyone sending a manuscript wants to be able to demonstrate, in the event of a dispute, which version existed and when. Anyone working professionally with images, drafts or concepts wants to document their own work before it is circulated. And anyone using AI tools will, in future, have to explain more frequently which elements were created by humans, without AI support. MyCopyright offers an initial solution for this.
At present, using MyCopyright requires a management agreement with ProLitteris (membership), specifically in the role of author. The service will become available to publishing houses and other rights holders at a later date. There are also plans to extend the service to cover files with a purpose similar to that of copyright, e.g. in the trade secrets sector, the media publications sector, the security and compliance sector, or the inheritance law sector.