Under the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, adopted back in 1883, copyrighted items (which today encompass articles, works of music and visual arts and computer programs, among others) do not have to be registered. Copyright is assumed to be automatic and to be established as soon as an item has been created. However, in practice, the authorship of a specific copyrighted work often has to be proven, especially when it comes to online content.

Existing means of registering copyright, such as repositories or notary certification, are either unreliable (since a repository organization could go out of business at any time) or expensive (especially if a large number of items needs to be registered).

• The easiest way of establishing authorship is by storing a digital ‘cast’ of a copyrighted item in a public decentralized registry — the Waves Enterprise blockchain’s mainnet. For this purpose, an author uses the online notary data service, uploading a file representing a copyrighted item to a service that will form a transaction with a digital cast of the item (a hash sum) and send it to the blockchain.
• On the blockchain, information is stored in a chain of blocks, each of which contains a list of transactions entered to the registry by users, and the previous block’s hash sum. This data organization enables immutability of earlier entered data. Thus, a transaction with a digital cast cannot be deleted or altered.

• To verify the fact of uploading a specific copyrighted item as opposed to any other file, the file needs to be rehashed and its hash sum compared against data on the blockchain. Thus, blockchain storage of a time-stamped digital cast of a copyrighted item can serve as proof of authorship.
• Based upon a digital cast, the service issues a digital certificate for a copyrighted item.

This is a simple and fast way to prove authorship of a copyrighted item.