Regstones
- built for creative artists like you -
the simplest way to protect your copyright
try it now
try it now
Legally speaking, your art (songs, lyrics, ...) are yours “by nature”. However, you need a qualifying evidence of your creation to be equipped for potential future conflicts.
Regstones delivers you this evidencing certificate. Into your own hands. No account to be created, no dependency on us. All-in cost of only 2,99€.
One paying usage and you immediately get your personal promocode. Share it with your friends! They can buy a certificate half the price, and you get a credit for a free certificate each time your promocode is used! click here for more info on promocode
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The digital seal on your certificate is fully compliant to the world’s strictest regulations.
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No end-date to the validity of your certificate - store it, use it, archive it for decades.
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No one will ever be able to reverse-engineer a music file to match your unique certificate.
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Simply select the file representing your art (mp3, doc, pdf, ...)
We combine its digital fingerprint with your identity
We create a timestamped and sealed certificate
You get this certificate immediately
Use of standard Adobe signature features
The free Adobe Reader is all you need
Your certificate autonomously manages its validity
You own your certificate and you are fully independent from us
Digital timestamp signature plus sealing signature
Highest Source of Trust
Long-term valid (LTV) signature
The document self-reports its unaltered state
All information on signatures and timestamps easily accessible
Timestamp time reported in each applied signature
Usable in all member countries of the Berne Convention (so virtually all countries globally)
use our service once (buy a certificate for only 2,99€)
you receive a promocode - share this code generously with your friends!
thanks to your code, your friends pay half the price
we credit you with a free certificate for each friend using your code!
As active musicians we always had this challenge that you might know very well: to build our fan base, we published and distributed our songs quite generously via Soundcloud, via YouTube, via mail campaigns, you name it. And we always had this bad feeling: what happens if someone steals our ideas, our hook-lines, pieces of our lyrics, or even entire songs? Will we be well enough equipped to claim our priority?
We searched for a legally valid, broadly accepted, long-time seal on our creative works but simple and cheap, no expensive notary services and surely not a service where you must create accounts, do regular payments, and then hope that the provider will still exist when you may finally need its support. We wanted something as simple as possible, but we didn’t find it. So, we created this service ourselves and called it Regstones (a short form for “register tones”).
Nearly all countries in the world have signed off the so-called Berne Convention, which means that you naturally own the copyright of the works that you have created. Yet in case of a conflict you will need to evidence that you have been the first author. But that’s the tricky thing: what could serve as such evidence, knowing that disputes may occur in many years from now? Simple date entries of recording files are no qualifying evidence, everybody can change system time easily. Postal timestamps on letters used to send your CD to yourself are weak, it is easy to produce a simple stamp, and the evidence gets lost the first time you open the letter. Notary seals work, but they are cumbersome to get and much too expensive. The music industry therefore uses more and more digital seals to evidence authorship.
Musicians in the US: please note that you have a special national context with your copyright office. We do not claim to replace the services it offers.
The digitally sealed Regstones certificate is your undisputable “my song existed already” evidence. This short video explains how it works. Here is a quick summary:
On our site you enter your identity (name and date of birth) and your song name. Then you select a file representing your art (for example mp3 files for songs, word or pdf documents for partition or lyrics).
Our service then calculates a unique digital fingerprint of your respective file, in a process that cannot be reverse-engineered (the technical term is “hashing”). We combine this fingerprint and your identity into a pdf document, and let this pdf document digitally timestamp and seal by a trust service provider of the European Union, one of the few organizations worldwide which shows certified compliance with the eIDAS regulation.
The signature applied is LTV-enabled (LTV = “Long-Term Validation”). With this, your certificate will confirm at any time in the future that its content has not been changed since it was timesptamed. The certificate therefore evidences that your song existed already at the moment of signature. The LTV quality of the signature allows you to use or to archive each certificate for as long as you want, even many decades.
When you receive your certificate, you need to store it safely (e.g. on a memory stick, on a google drive or similar), together with your music file. Pay attention that it is the same file that you used for our service, as your certificate will only establish the copyright evidence in combination with that file. Any other version, even if only the smallest bit is different, produces a completely different digital fingerprint.
We want to offer you our service at the lowest possible price. That’s why we try to avoid any form of marketing but kindly ask you to tell your friends and fellows about Regstones. In return, we offer you to use our service completely for free. Our illustration above give you the overview how it works – here is more detail to it:
With your first purchase of a certificate, you get immediately a promocode sent to you per mail. This promocode is your personal promocode, linked to your identity and email, and you can use it and benefit of it without limitation!
Please share your code with as many people as you want, e.g. your friends, your fellow musicians, or even the broader public using twitter, Instagram etc. With your promocode, each friend only pays half the price for a certificate and each such reduced purchase triggers a credit for you for 1 free certificate.
So, the more people you reach out to the better:) – your friends protect their art at an extremely low price, and, possibly, you will never have to pay again a single cent for having all your copyright documented.
To promote your code via social media, you could use a text e.g. like: “Hey check out Regstones.com – a good FAQ about copyright for musicians, and a very friendly service offer for which you can use my promocode XXXX - it will give you 50% off. Enjoy!”
To enjoy your credits, simply enter your promocode at checkout and you will won’t need to go through PayPal but get your certificate without paying. You will see your credit balance reported next to the promocode field; additionally, we inform you via email each time when someone used your code and you earned a credit.
Make sure you always use the email address connected with your promocode – your email address is the identifier under which we accrue your credits.
It depends on your answer to this question: Are you sure that the association will effectively support your claim in case of a conflict? This would require that you have early on submitted your partitions or songs, AND the organization is ready to hand out this evidence to support your case, AND (!) you are still member of this association in that future moment. Regarding the GEMA: note that this association is obliged to neutrality in case of copyright conflicts. You can read more in the GEMA FAQs (unfortunately only available in German).
If you want to be independent of all these limitations, you should consider our service.
YouTube adds a rough timestamp to your uploaded file (e.g. “uploaded 4 years ago”). No one will probably try to claim that YouTube is corrupting timestamps on purpose, so the assigned timestamps will be valuable in case of a legal dispute. However, consider four major downsides: the first one is, that the timestamps are of rough nature, so looking backward you will not know which song was uploaded first in a given year. The second is, that you are mixing up your publications strategy with your legal protection, and you cannot replace your videos by newer versions or take them out completely to not lose your initial timestamp. Third, you delay the shown time of creation significantly, due to the big time lag between the writing of your song and your production and publication of it. And fourth, YouTube is completely out of the game for songs that you have written for someone else, or which you play only live. With Regstones you nail down your copyright immediately, and stay completely free in your production and publishing choices.
You need a seal that is legally accepted and not limited in time. The digital seals used by Regstones fulfil both requirements based on compelling TECHNICAL facts. This has to do with their quality of being fully compliant with the norms RFC 3161, ETSI EN 319 421, and with the eIDAS regulation. Documents sealed by these standards will report that they haven’t been altered since the application of the seal, which is a technical proof that the content of the document existed at the timestamped time.
The notary on the other hand, would confirm as a PERSON the existence of your work at the date where he/she has seen it. And the trust in the correctness of this confirmation is based on the status of the notary, based on his or her official oath. Both types of seals have full value for your copyright protection, yet the Regstones seals are much cheaper and much easier to get.
Usually, digital signatures come with an expiration date. Certificates signed with such signature will become worthless after the signature expiration date, which is something to avoid. You rightfully want to have your copyright documented for unlimited time. Therefore, Regstones uses the latest technology of so-called “LTV” enabled signatures. The bright idea behind this concept is, that all relevant information that document the validity of the signatures and timestamps are embedded in the signed document itself, which secures unlimited validity - a very elegant solution.
Well, congratulations! Firstly, because your song was apparently so ‘hot’ that it stimulated others to be maybe a bit too much inspired of it. And secondly and especially, if you have used our service upon creating your art. So, when you become aware of a possible abuse of your copyright, you should use your certificate together with your original file to demonstrate your priority. The hash of your original file will be produced again, and be matched to the timestamped hash in your certificate (our YouTube channel features a short video on how to re-create the hash). Experts will then still analyze the musical content of both songs to conclude whether and to what percentage a copyright infringement is given, a basis to discuss the right level of compensation. Our service is to have you well equipped for such conflicts, yet does not expand into legal advice or counsel activities during such a claim process.
