Dublin firm The Copyright Bank has created a clever solution to the problem of establishing the date (and authorship) of an original piece of work. It's a special envelope (more on how it works in a minute), which Hugh Kearns devised after some bitter experience in the design industry more than 10 years ago. "My background was in graphic design, advertising, theatre design and related activities," he explains. "Occasionally you would get a chance at a large, lucrative project. But it was becoming common practice for people to trawl the industry for submissions. There was no mechanism for protecting your work before it was published."
Submitted ideas would be stolen - "it was known in the industry as cherrypicking, and people took it as a fact of life." He vowed to fix the problem for good and, 10 years and many envelopes later, has perfected an elegant system which is far easier to watch than to explain.
First, write your signature (and today's date) in a box at the top of the envelope. Tear through a perforation which runs through the writing, to split the signature in two.
Next, detach a panel containing half the signature box, fill in the background information about the contents, fold it in three and seal it into a pocket in the envelope.
Then seal the work into the main envelope (it can take "up to 500 sheets of A4 paper"). The other half-signature and date are sealed in at the top;
Send the envelope by registered post to the Copyright Bank;
They extract the background info panel and put the information into a database, and send the panel back to you with a registration number - remember, this panel contains the halfsignature/date. Then if your copyright is infringed, they turn up in court with the envelope, you arrive with your half-signature/date, and before the judge the envelope is opened and the two halves match.
They have initially targeted people like designers and songwriters, but hope to expand to software, forensic material and even "a cheap and cheerful version for students", and a leadlined one for protecting magnetic media. The possibilities are endless. . .
The Copyright Bank is at: 54 Merrion Square, Dublin 2, tel 01- 661-3788.