We are well established in the area of copyright protection, with a history of experience in this very specialised sector. We protect the work of thousands of copyright owners from all over the world, and operate fast, comprehensive and secure registration facilities that provide strong copyright evidence designed to protect your rights at a worldwide level. All the services we provided by are backed by strict and comprehensive policies to ensure your security.
Before you register your work, you will of course want to know what is provided for the registration fee and ensure that your work is properly cared for, and most importantly that your work will be available as evidence in any future disputes.
Data loss and disaster protection
Our personnel ensure that registrations are backed up electronically at the time of registration, and that encrypted electronic duplicates are stored in geographically separate locations. These duplicates are encrypted, stored on a variety of media types, and also replaced at regular intervals to ensure that valid copies of the work will always exist.
This ensures that your work cannot be accessed by any unauthorised person. It also ensures that a valid copy of your work will always be available, so if the media (i.e. CD) you submitted starts to degrade, if there is any disaster at our archive facilities, or if you simply lose the work yourself, we can always provide a replacement.
Contractual contingency planning
Agreements are in place with our key personnel/directors, and written into our terms of service that guarantee that all registration contracts are honoured. These provision agreements specify that in the (very unlikely) event of a decision to close the company, there are named directors/personnel who are personally liable and responsible for ensuring all client contracts are honoured. This means that no matter what happens to our company, we will continue to ensure that your work is safely stored for the registration period, and that service administrators will still be available to produce evidence to help prove your copyright on request.
Protecting the integrity of evidence
It is the policy of Copyright Witness that we maintain a strict chain of custody for all registered works.
- Every deposit has it's own chain of custody
Every time you deposit work, whether it's a new registration, or an update, that deposit is treated as a separate item of evidence, with it's own unique reference, registration date, and audit trail.
This means that the evidence we provide is as strong as it can possibly be.
Evidence available time after time
Whenever we produce a work as evidence, it is provided as a copy, rather than the original deposit. This ensures that the evidence will still be available for use in any further proceedings.
True independent witnessing
- Truly independent evidence
Unlike some often quoted ‘alternatives’, registration with Copyright Witness provides truly independent evidence of your copyright claim.
Most importantly, when you register your work, it is securely stored, cannot be directly updated and you have no direct access to it. This means that we can guarantee that the copy we hold is a genuine record of your work as it existed at that point in time. This is particularly important if you ever need a copy of the work produced as evidence in a legal case. (for more on this see our page discussing the alternatives).
We are not a guild or association that requires you to become a member, and we have no direct affiliation with any organisation representing author or artist rights, (etc.).This is important, because it means that we have no vested interest in your claim, and can therefore be truly impartial when we supply evidence.
The strength and integrity of evidence we provide is of of paramount importance, and our strict procedures ensure that evidence cannot be tampered with and is always available as verifiable independent evidence whenever it is needed.
Security for you and your work
We regard all information and works that you provide as strictly confidential, and have strict policies governing the transmission and storage of data to ensure that we never allow your information, or your work, to fall into the hands of parties who could misuse it.
Our security page has details of the measures we take to guarantee your privacy and security.
All services are not the same
We know of no other organisation that provides this level of service.
We often see sites claiming to offer a similar service, but that only allow small or single file uploads. Besides working out more expensive for registering files of any significant size, all the services we have investigated relied on third party hosted systems, and commonly used non-secure transfer methods (such as email or standard http connection rather than https) - such activities are prohibited under our service standards.
Many services we investigated did not backup registered works, relied on the copyright holder to store the work themselves, (and thus provided no independent evidence), or simply return the work in a dispute, (and therefore the copyright holder has no evidence for future disputes).
