Video Example of Simple Registration
Mario Pena
A quick video just to show the basic way to register a single content in a file. Will create more and better videotutorials in the following weeks.
2 commentsJune 16th, 2009
The New Safe Creative is here
Mario Pena
The New Safe Creative is here and brings quite a few novelties. Maybe the most important is not to be externally seen, because it’s on the internal side. We have changed the whole architecture with the aim of being more agile to bring new features to the site and strengthen the security of registered contents.
Besides this main change, we are going to highlight some of the key changes you can actually see and use. Just mention that in the next months we are going to introduce some very cool features to the site and will be informing as soon as possible.
* Redesign of the site: We have greatly improved the design and usability of the site. Now the browsing is much easier and registering is more intuitive than ever. We might highlight the new home, menus, important changes in the page to upload and register works and the new ways to administrate registered works.
New Safe Creative's home
Public view with work's details
* Customizable public profile: Users now can create their own public space by creating a special link to their public profile. A place show their works and to get feedback from their public. Also they can decide how to be contacted, if the choose to to allow this, of course. They can make their email public or allow only to be contacted through a form.
Add commentJune 10th, 2009
Safe Creative to be renewed
Mario Pena
Hi everybody,
We have greatest news! Next 10th June and starting at 08:00 GMT+2 we are going to proceed to change the version of Safe Creative’s web. We are talking about a major change with big and important improvements we really hope you will enjoy.
Now some details we have to consider during the process:
- During the migration registry services at http://www.safecreative.org will not be avaliable for about 24 hours.
- If you have used digital certificates to identify yourself at the old version you can asign them in the new version.
- We will tell you with another mail as soon as the services are up again.
- During the following days, searches and downloading of works will be disabled until the migration process of all works to the new system is finished.
- If you detect any difficulty or have any suggestion, don’t hesitate to tell us by conctacting through our contact form.
In next communications will tell you about the new features of this version.
Thanks a lot,
Safe Creative’s Team
Add commentJune 8th, 2009
Conclusions after the Registries and Semantic Technologies Conference
Mario Pena
Last May 20th we organized the First Conference about the Role of Copyright Registries in the Global Digital Networks with the participation of prestigious authorities on copyright issues both national (Spain) and international.
General view of the room while Sr. Richard Owens from WIPO speaks
We want to specially thank the presence of Mr. Richard Owens, (Director of Copyright E-Commerce, Technology & Management Division, World Intellectual Property Organization - WIPO), Mr. Leonardo Cervera (Intellectual Property expert, Internal Markets General Management, European Commission) , Mr. Miguel Angel Calle (Central Copyright Registrar, Spanish Minisgtry of Culture), Mr. Ignacio Garrote (Head professor of Civil Law at Universidad Autonoma of Madrid), and Mrs. Asuncion Gomez (Head of department at the Univ. Politécnica de Madrid and director or the OEG at UPM).
We are happy to state the interest and possibilities all of them confirmed through their speeches about the idea Safe Creative is proposing; to foster online digital registries and other organizations beeing the ones to give semantic information about works in an open, standardized and interactive way.
Fom left to right: Ricardo Gómez Cabalier from Institute of Author Rights -SGAE group-, Ani Defunkid López from Lamundial.net, Miguel Ángel Calle from the Central Registry of Spain, Carlos Martí from IESE, David Maeztu lawyer and advisor at Safe Creative and collaborator at Creative Commons Spain, Marc Gauvin from NetPorteditems and member of DMP representing sDae, and Tíscar Lara, researcher and professor of communication studies regards free culture.
Just as many lecturers stated, online copyright registers can add an enormous value and potential to ease the diffusion of the information in the digital networks by linking authors to their works. Today this function is the best guarantee to actually protect copyrighted works and not beeing a mere authorship proofs’ host. During the event we showed a prototype API to explain the way this information might be delivered regardless of the platform. The new version of Safe Creative’s web will be due in about one month and a half.
We want to extend the invitation made at the event also to the ones who for one or other reason did not have the chance to attend but are interested into exploring new ways to deliver copyright information accross the web: We want to invite them to join a free and independent project named semanticcopyright.org; this project will try to establish politics and standards for registries and systems to perform queries and give information about copyrights in an interoperable and coordinated way using semantic technologies. Anyone interested, please contact us through this link.
Add commentMay 25th, 2009
Magnatune and Safe Creative reach agreement
Mario Pena
We are very excited to announce serval important agreement we have signed during the last months. Recently we signed an agreement with Magnatune, pioneer online music label, to register all it’s contents with Safe Creative.
Magnatune, with more than 8,000 tracks, is one of the leading projects to achieve new business models involving music and open licenses such as Creative Commons. Thanks to this agreement, Magnatune’s catalog will be incorporated into Safe Creative’s register adding value to this netlabel. Also will find great benefit of the new semantic technologies we are developing for the next version of Safe Creative’s web due in about two months.
Add commentMay 19th, 2009
News about Safe Creative and Congress
Mario Pena
In about one month Safe Creative is going to add a communication channel for programs, also called API with semantic web applications: A door through which any program can query us about rights info from a specific file and get a comprehensive answer.
“We are very excited working towards this contribution, as we are convinced that the challenges technology has put on copyright issues have the solution again with technology without the need to undermine the rights of some citizens in favour of the rights of others” explains Juan Palacio, CEO from Safe Creative.
We are working on solutions to lower the barriers some groups want to put against the free distribution of common culture. It’s vital that the new ways to help distribution and communication get not to be closed down for those who use them to liberate their creations, but avoiding at the same time, and as far as possible, injure the rights of the ones who opt not to.
May 20th we are discussing with some of the most relevant actors in this issues about copyright registries, authorship, information, about the possibilities of semantic technologies and will invite all to construct a Web in which contents can live both free and respecting the rights of authors. More information about the event here: http://www.semanticcopyright.org
Add commentMay 14th, 2009
Next events in May
Mario Pena
Will will give you more information and details about the next events we organize or are participating at.
Briefly here the next confirmed ones:
Conference at the Public University of the Basque Country about Online Registries
Conference and Workshops about the Role of Online Copyright Registries in the Digital Networks
Add commentApril 27th, 2009
Legal and evidential effectiveness of inscriptions in Safe Creative’s register
Andy Ramos
Since it has become clear that copyrights on original and creative Works exist from the moment of their creation, as settled by the Berne Convention (article 5), Registers’ useness has been focused on a mere inscription where authors and rightholders declare their Rights. The goal is, therefore, to make a written record of a declaration of Rights before third parties, although, as mentioned before, this registration will not have formal effects (it does not generate nor recognise any right, it does only work as a recipient of the said declaration); in plain English, the main purpose of a Register is to be able to prove that one work was created before other, so as to give this work the originality upon which the law protects that work.
Inscriptions made in public Registers of Intellectual Property prove that at some point, someone registered a work in some place and declared the ownership of the Rights related to that work, which gives this registration an “iuris tantum” legal effectiveness, as it may be countered by an opposite proof (a third person could prove somehow his work was created sometime earlier). This is applicable for all kind of Copyright Registers, which is one of the elements that distinguishes Intellectual Property from Industrial Property (patents, trademarks, designs…), where the inscription in the relevant Register after having satisfied the administrative procedure is actually what makes the rights exist.
The assessment/value of the inscriptions in a judicial procedure
Everything that has been said before does not diminish the importance and value of the Copyright Registers. If, at some point, someone pretends to refute the authorship and those Rights related to that condition, or in case we are facing a plagiarism or any unauthorized use of a work, the inscription shall be very useful during a judicial procedure, as it can be used as a valid proof. In such cases, joining that declaration from the register to the demand itself would be enough to prove the Rights and the authorship.
This representation made by public registers, will be taken as a public document before any kind of jurisdiction (criminal, civil or administrative), giving the declaration complete evidential effects.
In the U.S., the Federal Rules of Evidence establish how the facts have to be proven by the parties in the federal courts and in some state courts. Under these rules, all relevant evidences are admissible by the court, defining “relevant evidence” as all evidence having any tendency to make the existence of any fact that is of consequence to the determination of the action more probable or less probable than it would be without the evidence (Rule 401).
In the U.S. legal system, authentication of these private documents is a key issue, establishing Rule 901 that this requirement is satisfied when the evidence is able to support a finding that the matter in question is what its proponent claims. Some Safe Creative’s users are quite concerned about the validity of SC’s Registry in their jurisdiction, giving the fact that SC is a company legally established in Spain (Europe). The Federal Rules of Evidence, and in general almost all jurisdictions, admits or declare valid those documents that are proven sufficient to demonstrate the existence of a fact.
Safe Creative’s Copyright Registry
In this regard, Safe Creative is a private Register of digital contents where users can register their Works, establishing a proof of their authorship and copyrights. In accordance with the service’s terms and conditions, the user agrees to deposit her works and Safe Creative agrees to watch over the contents and informations according to the established conditions, publishing and allowing access to that information to any third person, but not being able to make any exploitation of such in prejudice of user’s rights and interests. In practical terms, Safe Creative becomes a third person who, through computing procedures, stores the content provided by users, allowing to register the mentioned information and the time they were stated.
The goal of this system is, just as in public copyright registers or in a escrow agreement made by a notary public, to have a valid evidence in order to prove a plagiarism or an unlawful use of a work. Safe Creative’s systems are based on strong technologies that encrypt contents uploaded by its users, adding some timestamps capable of proving the date of the registration, which form a solid structure that can be used in a court to prove the existence of a work before other of a potential infringer.
In addition, this service has the advantage that it is free, accessible through the Internet, global and neutral, and it allows to establish and record the right policy or licence of use defined previously by the user. Having this done, and for instance in the case of Copyleft licences, Safe Creative will incorporate the user’s declaration of will regarding the permitted uses of the work, which constitutes a guaranty before third’s use of the content according to those conditions.
Safe Creative can issue digital certificates based on the register’s data, regarding the date of the inscription, the author or authors and exploitation rightsholders, as much as regarding it’s content and pre-established use policy. Those certificates are free and double-signed digitally by the issuer, that is, Safe Creative.
In conclusion, authors who register their work in Safe Creative’s Registry have a valid way to prove that some content was created in a certain date, having a certificate issued by a company that has implemented in its systems technologies that are able to prove such statement.
1 commentApril 6th, 2009
PSD file to put your registry number on your images
Mario Pena
Many of you have contacted us showing interest on how to automatically mark your images with the rigistration number together with Safe Creative’s logo. We are right now working on a module that will do this, but in the meanwhile you can download this .psd photoshop file to mark the images manually. Hope it’s of some use.
Add commentFebruary 19th, 2009
The New Paradigm of Content Protection by Online Registries
Mario Pena
Safe Creative is a copyright registry trying to give value to a new paradigm of content creation.
This new paradigm, is our belief, means that the best way to actually protect contents is to be able to deliver together with it information about author and rights that might interact with any program or service maybe on a semantic web way. An online registry is what actually does: Serves information. The more accurate and the more accesible the information the better the protection or “safer” the travel of contents through the Web.
We don’t mean to “protect” meaning not allowing copy, but instead to be able to deliver enough information together with the content to dissuade plagiarists as they realice content is registered and can be tracked and at the same time ease legitimate reuse of it. Doing this for free, of course, is something that might socialize and standardize content registration in the future.
I think this is just a beginning of a new era of digital services, and we are working on some technologies to provide deeper and stronger content identification together with some tools to fairly spread knowledge of those contents. But we are under development of these technologies.
On the other hand, right now our efforts have been conducted to achieve a strong and good content storage and authoriship claim proof. This proofs can be easily used on court if necessary. We are also starting some collaborations for content tracking through the Internet.
If we understand that right now the biggest risk for contents is not to be able to achieve awareness about them, giving tools to allow a safer spreading of them in the Internet is the clue to find the minimal protection needed to ensure those contents will not fall into deadly oblivion.
Add commentFebruary 10th, 2009
