Priya finishes a character design at 11 p.m. and posts it to her portfolio and two client group chats within the hour, the way most working illustrators do. Six weeks later a marketplace listing turns up with the same character, a different name attached, and a for-sale tag. She has the original layered file on her laptop and a folder of drafts going back three weeks. What she does not have is anything that proves, to someone who has never met her, that the file existed first and that she is the person who made it. A time-stamped upload to a portfolio site is not that. A DM is not that. This is the gap MyCopyright is built to close.
MyCopyright is Swiss Trust Layer's register, and as of this week the full set of pieces behind it is live on the platform: seal a file, verify the person behind it, hold a copy in escrow, generate a code for the work itself, and label what role AI played, if any. None of these are separate products bolted together. They are one registration, done once, that produces one sealed record.
What happens when you register a work
Sign in, upload the file, and the platform runs through five things. None of them require you to understand the cryptography underneath, and none of them require a lawyer in the room.
1. Seal: the exact file, and a qualified timestamp
The platform generates a cryptographic hash of your exact file, so the sealed record is tied to that file and not a description of it, and issues a qualified electronic timestamp. Under Article 41 of eIDAS, a qualified timestamp carries a legal presumption of the accuracy of the date and time it shows, and of the integrity of the data it is attached to. In practice that means the burden shifts: it is no longer on you to convince someone the file hasn't been altered since that date. You get the sealed record back as a PDF you can hand to a client, a court, or a platform's copyright team.
2. Identity: a verified person, not an anonymous account
A file sealed by "user482" proves very little about who made it. The Identity check on Swiss Trust Layer runs a passport-based verification through a qualified provider, opened from a QR code on the sealed record. Once it's done, the registration is tied to a real, checked identity rather than an email address. This is the piece that turns "someone sealed this file" into "this named, verified person sealed this file."
3. Escrow: a copy held in Switzerland, independent of wherever else you keep it
Once identity verification is complete, you can also save a copy of the sealed file into Escrow Storage, hosted in Switzerland, separate from your regular cloud storage. The point of escrow is independence: if the platform you originally posted to takes the file down, if a hard drive fails, or if a cloud account gets locked, the escrowed copy and its proof record still exist. Escrow sits behind identity verification on purpose, because a stored copy is only as trustworthy as the check on who put it there.
4. ISCC: a code for the work, not just the file
Alongside the hash and the timestamp, the platform generates an International Standard Content Code for the file, built to ISO 24138:2024. Where a hash identifies one exact file byte-for-byte, an ISCC identifies the content itself, in a way that can be checked and compared without ever exposing the underlying file. You can see the code, the ISCC-ID, and the underlying data and meta hashes on the record for every sealed file.
5. Content labels: what role AI played, on the record
Every sealed file also carries a content label, chosen once and locked after that. There are six: AI FREE, AI ASSISTED, AI MODIFIED, AI GENERATED, HUMAN AUTHORED, and HUMAN APPROVED. The two human-facing labels are tied to identity on purpose: HUMAN AUTHORED can only be selected alongside AI FREE, and HUMAN APPROVED has to be applied by a verified person who is not the original author. That structure exists so the label means something more than a checkbox someone filled in about their own work.
Why "register once, carry the proof everywhere"
Copyright itself doesn't need a register to exist. Under the Berne Convention, copyright arises automatically the moment an original work is fixed, and that protection is recognized without any registration formality across more than 180 member countries, Priya's included. MyCopyright doesn't create that right. What it creates is evidence of it: a sealed, dated, identity-linked record you can point to the moment someone disputes who made a piece of work first, or when.
That distinction matters most outside Switzerland and the EU. In the United States, 17 U.S.C. § 411 requires a US work to be registered before its owner can sue for infringement in US federal court at all, a separate, formal precondition that a Berne country's automatic protection does not satisfy on its own. MyCopyright is not a substitute for that federal registration if a US lawsuit is where a dispute ends up. What it is designed to do is give you, everywhere else, the thing automatic copyright alone doesn't: a specific, verifiable, dated record of the exact file, tied to a checked identity, that you can produce the day someone asks "prove it was you."
What we haven't said
Escrow and the underlying flows currently handle everyday file sizes reliably; very large files are a known limitation the team is still working through, so we are only describing what works today, not making a blanket size claim. Recovery, if you lose access entirely, works through re-verifying your identity, online or in person through a KYC agent, restoring access to your records and escrowed files. Beyond that one sentence, we're not putting a number or a guarantee on recovery until the wording is finished. And MyCopyright was built together with Switzerland's collecting society for text and visual arts; we're not naming the partnership publicly in more detail than that yet.
The rest of this week
This post is the overview. Over the next few days we're going deeper on each piece: what a qualified timestamp actually proves versus what it doesn't, what identity-verified escrow changes about where your files sit, and how the ISCC code works without ever exposing the file it describes.
Register once
If you make things, the moment to have a sealed, identity-verified record isn't after a dispute starts. It's now, while the file is still just a file. Start a registration, or read how the process works end to end before you do.
