A designer sends a client the finished logo. Eight months later the client's new agency says it drew the mark itself, and produces a file dated before her delivery. She has the final PNG and an export date set by her own computer. She has nothing that shows the mark taking shape on her desk over three weeks in spring.
The final file shows what was made. The drafts show who made it. Most creators keep the final and throw away the drafts, which is the wrong way round when a dispute comes.
What a single final file proves
A sealed final proves a great deal, and it is worth being exact. Sealing computes a cryptographic fingerprint of the file and binds it to a qualified timestamp. Under Article 41(2) of the eIDAS Regulation, a qualified electronic time stamp enjoys the presumption of the accuracy of the date and time it indicates and of the integrity of the data bound to it. So the sealed final proves that this exact file existed at that moment and has not changed since.
It proves one state at one time. It does not say how the file came to exist, or that the person who sealed it is the person who made it. A fixed point is not a story.
Where the law puts the burden
The Swiss Copyright Act is short on this. Article 6 says the author is the natural person who created the work. Article 8 paragraph 1 adds a presumption: unless proven otherwise, the author is the person whose name, pseudonym or distinctive sign appears on the copies or the publication of the work.
The presumption can be rebutted. If someone else's name is on the published copies, you have to prove otherwise. If your name is on them, the other side will try. The argument turns on evidence of creation, and evidence of creation looks like drafts: the rough version, the one with the wrong typeface, the chapter that was cut, the commit that broke everything. A dated chain of those is hard to fake after the fact, because a timestamp cannot be added backwards.
How versions work on Swiss Trust Layer
In the portal, a sealed folder has a Version History. "Add new Version" uploads the next state of the work. Each version is sealed and certified on its own, with its own fingerprint and its own qualified timestamp, and gets its own certificate of proof. The certificate lists the sealed date and time in UTC and each file with its hash, and its QR code opens the public verification page for that version, with no login.
You can attach a note to each version. "Add a note about this version" is where you write what changed and why: "second pass after client call", "removed the third act", "switched to the serif". Months later the notes read as a diary of the work, written at the time, under a timestamp.
Content labels are per version. A version sealed without labels stays that way; the portal tells you so and asks you to create a new version, declare its files and seal it. Re-sealing with new declarations creates a new sealed version rather than overwriting the old one.
An issued version does not move. Its hashes and its declared labels never change. The certificate for a version can be updated later with ISCC data for its files and with your verified identity, and the portal says plainly that no new version is created when that happens.
What the chain does not prove
A timestamp on a draft shows that the draft existed at that time. It does not show that you wrote it. Someone could seal a file copied from you, and their timestamp would be as accurate as yours. What a chain of drafts gives you is something a copier rarely has: earlier, rougher versions than theirs, sealed before their final.
Identity verification closes part of the gap. If the account has passed the passport check, a version sealed afterwards carries an identity block on its certificate: surname, name, date of birth, country, with the passport number masked. That snapshot is taken at sealing time, so a later change on the account never rewrites a certificate already issued. The seal then ties the draft to a verified person rather than to an account name alone.
The content labels are a declaration, not a finding. HUMAN AUTHORED can be declared together with AI FREE and with no other AI label, and the two HUMAN labels are bound to the verified identity. It still counts for something, because a declaration made at the time of the work is a different thing from one made after the claim arrives.
A rhythm that holds up
Seal at milestones, not at every keystroke. A chain of forty near-identical versions is noise. A chain of six that each mark a real step is a record. For a manuscript that might be the outline, the complete first draft, the draft after structural edits, and the version sent to the publisher.
Keep the originals unchanged. The seal covers the fingerprint of the exact file, so the file you sealed is the file you must keep, byte for byte. Edit a copy, never the original, and store each sealed draft with its certificate in more than one place.
If the list in ten questions a lawyer will ask about your PDF is the test, a version chain answers the question about when, and gives you material for the question about who.
One step this week
Pick a piece of work you are in the middle of. Seal the state it is in now as a version with a one-line note, and decide what the next milestone is. You cannot go back and seal the history you never recorded. You can start recording from here.
Seal your first document on Swiss Trust Layer or read the full mechanism on how it works.
