Registered Commons

What are the registration steps?

Select License

You need to choose under which license you want to register your works. The license explains the terms under which others will be granted to view, use and share your work: Creative Commons,  GNU GPL, Sampling, Public Domain or All rights reserved.

Describe your work

You have to describe details about your work for the Registered Commons Catalogue: Author(s) and Contributors, Title, Keywords, Media type, Language, Moral Rights and more can be entered.  In most countries, moral rights describe, in which circumstances you don't want your work being published at all.

Upload

Upload the work and we will calculate the hash code. Hash code will be stored for 7 years, the timestamp for 35 years,  and your work  under fair use principles (yes, we have a plenty of disk space, but we might not store videos for an eternal period). In case you need a lot of space, contact us.

Get Certificate

Noc you can link to the certificate and anybody can download a pdf certificate (contains all metadata, user info, trust levels and hash). We can also snail-mail a stamped and signed version for a fee, if you need to attach the certificate to a contract.

What is RegisteredCommons about?

Since the dawn of the Internet Era it has become increasingly difficult to publish creative work (online) while maintaining control over intellectual property rights. The bottom line is once released on the world wide web types of use and destination of your work are basically out of control. Ultimately, someone might even claim your work as theirs. But how are you going to prove that you are indeed the author of a series of blog entries that have become the new hype overnight? And how will you claim your role as Director of Photography of the new Sitcom thousands of people all of a sudden want to watch online?

That's where RegisteredCommons sets in. At RegisteredCommons you can securely register your authorship of your creativing workings, no matter if it's photography, poetry, a series of videos or an open source software project. The service is aimed, first and foremost, at people who like to share their workings under less restrictive licensing terms than the very constrictive All-rights-reserved regime, but it is not limited to works under a Creative Commons or the General Public License. If you prefer to have complete control over what is happening with your work, i.e. if you use the All-rights-reserved model, you can also register your authorship with RegisteredCommons.

Who is RegisteredCommons for?

RegisteredCommons is a service for people like you, who like to share their works under certain licence-agreements. We don't think it's an alternative to lock away your work - what's a work without it's audience?

How do I register a web page?

You can easily register a html page as a document. If you want to register a complete web page, you should save it for example with Firefox and then package it for example as one zip or tar file. Then you can timestamp this file with RC.

The entry field for a "Work URL" does not fetch files (yet). This may be a feature in the next release.

Who are the people behind RegisteredCommons?

RegisteredCommons is a service established and provided by a public-private partnership. The public partner, the University of Applied Sciences Vorarlberg, located in the Austrian Alps close to the Swiss and German border, provides bandwidth and storage for the service. Private partners are organised in a co-op organisation. Registered users of the service may also become RegisteredCommons shareholders. Maximum shares are limited to 20 votes per co-op organisation member, regardless of how much money is being invested. Thus, the co-op can not be sold on the capital market. The co-op members keep control over the service through their vote in the general assembly.

Why is RegisteredCommons part of a co-op organisation?

A co-operative is a type of organisation far from a regular company, as it is owned by its members and run by democratic principles. Company shares cannot be bought through the stock market. If one uses the co-op's services and is in support of its values and principles one can apply for co-op membership, therefor own a share of the organisation and take part in the managment of the organisation. All profits resulting from the RegisteredCommons service, because it is locally owned in form of a co-op and not a PLC or AG company floated on the sotck market, and because the board of directors members are also members of the co-op, flow back to the development of an open culture, supporting open source and open content projects and services. Therefore RegisteredCommons is also a political statement. RegisteredCommons is commited to give back economic power and creative technologies infrastructure to the users. Economic models such as Google (its value is estimated higher than all swiss banks together) do not count on real nor on shareholders' value. See the EPIC_ 2014 animation which shows the direction: no more independent media. EPIC: http://epic.lightover.com/ All data sent to RegisteredCommons is owned by its users. Users can delete their data at any time. As long as a work is still registered with RegisteredCommons, its hashcode and timestamp are being stored for seven years.

Can I become a RegisteredCommons co-op member?

Yes. The Internationaler Medienverbund co-op minimum membership fee is EUR 100,-. With a maximum of 20 shares that can be bought, the maximum fee is EUR 2000,-. Bought shares are owned for a lifetime. Members receive certain benefits such as the right to annually vote for the Board of Directors and other bodies to represent their interests. Members can also participate in activities like training days, attend regular meetings to voice their opinions and to keep informed about the co-op's progress.

What are Moral Rights and how can I express them with RC?

When you register a work, in the submission form, in the section License Information you may enter how you wish your work to or not to be used.

Here you may indicate, where your work shall or shall not be used (e.g. by organisations, that support production of weapons). Or under which conditions you would allow for-profit use. However, this is not part of the legal license text. Still, anybody who looks up your license will see it.

Also see the CC FAQ for further reference:

What happens when I sign-up for RegisteredCommons?

From experience intellectual property rights are respected much more in the digital commons culture than in traditional copyright environments. The trend to Digital Rights Management (DRM) tools does not take place without any reason. Just think of the millions of illegal copies of Hollywood movies that are being distributed all over the world. DRM, however, will substantially narrow private use of legally acquired content. The strategy of many major companies to cope with challenges of the digital age is to downgrade their product. On the other side, many people have already started to realize the emerging possibilities of reaching large audiences by sharing their content online with less restrictive legal frameworks such as Creative Commons licences. Sharing online unfortunately also means higher chances of infringement. Moreover, copyright clearing procedures for services intending to use such content are becoming harder if not impossible since many workings are published without any copyright notice or contact information. If you register your workings with RegisteredCommons you will not entirely eliminate copyright infringements (which is impossible) but you will be able to produce evidence that you published that work at a certain date under certain license terms. Service providers interested in your work will be able to varify creatorship and licensing terms at RegisteredCommons.

Will I give up my Intellectual Property Rights at RegisteredCommons?

No. In fact, we observe that the ownership of works is more strongly respected in the digital commons culture, than in traditional copyright environments. If you publish a work online there is always a risk, that somebody uses it in a way, which is not allowed by the licence you granted. This might still happen, even if you registered your work. The difference if you registered your work here, is that with RegisteredCommons there is strong evidence, that you have published that work at a certain date and under a certain licence. Thus you can prove your Ownership of the work (Wortkreation:Urhebership) for example in a court case. On the other side we also help content providers to re-publish your work and make it more well-known, but still respect the licence agreement.

Can I register my works without RegisteredCommons?

While RegisteredCommons is an innovation in its own right, it builds upon a well-established idea. One could claim and proof creatorship by sending self-addressed sealed envelops containing their work via snail mail, the envelope's postmark serving as the date of registration. However, this method was never exactly brilliant. The service offered by RegisteredCommons advances the timestamp concept into the digital era, by incorporating the existing method with state-of-the-art security mechanisms.

Of course you can still go to that local postal office in your neighbourhood if you prefer to secure your rights of ownership the old-fashioned way, or consult a notary's office to deposit your work (a secure but rather expensive way to register your work). Other ways of registering your work are documented at our WIKI pages. RegisteredCommons offers a really easy way, to prove your authorship.

What's a hash code?

MD-5 is a widely used cryptographic hash function which is can be used to identify any file.
To compare a file on your harddisk with a registration at RegisteredCommons, you can use one of the following methods:
Under Apple OSX, use the shell-command: md5 <filename>, if you're using Linux, use md5sum <filename>. For Windows(TM), there is a little free software (GPL) tool: MD5 GUI.

You can get all the Metadata of any file registered at RegisteredCommons, by using it in the url as in the following example: http://www.registeredcommons.org/hash/99c3fbf3fdce324c69ae9b12a0334a56

For more detailed articles about hash functions, see Wikipedia: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_function

What are RegisteredCommons Trust Levels? What is the role of CAcert?

Based on a point system at RegisteredCommons work and creator credibility are determined and assigned by different trust levels. A higher trust level means more reliability that a work is in fact from the creator it is assigned to.

You can gain trust for example using the Web of Trust service from CAcert. We are looking up your e-mail address at CAcert's directory. If you are listed there as a member of their Web of Trust, you have a higher trust level at RegisteredCommons. Have a look at their FAQ, how to become assured at CAcert.