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The internet has had a positive impact on the lives of millions of people, but it has its downsides as well. When you publish your work (text, photos, illustrations or something else) online, it can be copied and used by billions of people in one click. Taking down these copycats is time consuming and expensive, but there is another way. In this video, I will show you how WordProof helps you to protect your copyright and to take down infringements by using one of the case studies on our website.
Blom & Blom is a creative design studio based in Amsterdam. The brothers Martijn Blom and Kamiel Blom design industrial lights and give used lights a second life. They spend numerous hours on creating their products and on the content to promote it, such as the texts and photographs. Their designs are popular among individuals and business around the world, but also among copycats who copy their content. Regularly they stumble upon advertisers, for example on eBay, who copied their content to sell fake copies of their products.
Taking down a copycat without timestamps
Normally, the process to take down a copyright infringement looks like this:
- You discover an infringement
- You start collecting prove that you own the copyright. This can be complicated, especially if you didn’t do this upfront. It will cost a lot of time to build your case.
- Hire an attorney for writing a letter to request a take-down, assuming you’ve built solid enough proof of your copyright;
- Sometimes you succeed here, but often you will need to follow-up one or more times before your request will be honored.
By now, you have spent hours to collect proof that your content is your content, and a lawyer has spent hours to build the case and send the letters. This is a time and financially consuming process.
The solution: timestamp your content on publication
- With WordProof, all texts, images and videos will be timestamped instantly at the moment you post them. This makes building an archive a breeze!
- IF there’s an infringement, you now have a blockchain certificate for all content that proves ownership at different points in time. This makes it easier to prove you were first and makes it more difficult for copycats to say otherwise.
- You can use the WordProof Copyright Infringement Letter tool to generate a takedown letter that you can send to the infringers, along with the timestamps (thus proof of existence of your work).
- Both the original letter as a follow-up letter are created with the click of a button. Now you only have to send them to the copycat or the platform where the copycat is active!
WordProof replaces an expensive notarial process with a plug-and-play blockchain solution. Blom and Blom has used this numerous times to successfully take down copied content from websites, webshops, and market places such as eBay.
Monitoring the web for your content
Additionally, WordProof offers an add-on feature to monitor the internet for copies of your timestamped content and notify you when it pops-up somewhere online, making it easier for you to act against copycats.