06 jul Designers, rejoice! Finally a way to protect your prints in a heartbeat
If you’re reading this, chances are you’re someone who’d pick Illustrator over Excel any day of the week. During meetings, you don’t take notes, you doodle. In the old Mac vs PC clips, you’re definitely Mac (or at the very least not as cleanly shaven as PC).
Forgive the clichés, the point we’re making is this: you want to spend your time creating good designs, not ploughing through legal jibber-jabber and copyright laws. Then again, you would appreciate it if your designs could easily be proved to be yours.
Because yes: it’s a nasty world out there and your nice new print just might be eaten up by a large-scale fashion factory, ending up in high-street shops all over the globe, sometimes even before your own collection has hit the stores. Last year alone, several cases of such blatant chicanery were uncovered by the media.
Some large clothing manufacturers were exposed while shamelessly copying ideas, prints and designs from artists selling their work through independent channels, including famous names such as Anna Sui, Diane von Furstenberg and, closer to home, Murielle Scherre.
However, most of these designers choose not to press charges for these cases of copyright infringement, for reasons we will summarise as ‘David versus Goliath’: the big players have an army of lawyers at their disposal, as well as flush amounts of cash to drown out cases of small designers feeling infuriated. Sadly, these intimidation tactics seem effective.
The problem: it’s too expensive and too complex
By Toutatis! Is there no solace? Are there no solutions? Well, yes, there are. The European Registered Community Design offers to protect your designs within the borders of the continent. The good news is they put in a lot of work to see if your design is really unique before registering it. The bad news is this takes several months and costs 350 euro per design. Sigh.
Notaries are an option too, but the process is equally complex, time-consuming and thus quite costly. The result? Many designers refrain from protecting their designs. That’s where we saw an opportunity to offer better service, about 100 times cheaper than the first option and 1000 times as quick.
So how can you protect your work using Drawy?
First, you upload your design, which immediately renders a Design Key based on your design’s unique bit code. As soon as you hit the ‘register design’ button, your bit code is sent on to a Time Stamp Authority, an official organ appointed to grant time stamps. They will link your bit code to a unique electronic time stamp, which matches your Time Stamp Key.
Sounds complicated? Well, maybe a little, but the good news is this all happens automatically and in just a few seconds. And that’s not all, because at max. € 3,9 per protected design, Drawy offers not only the fastest, but also the cheapest solution on the web.
Once the process has been completed, you’ll receive a neat PDF file containing the Design Key, Time Stamp Key, deposition date, expiration date and a thumbnail of your design. This form of electronic stamping is accepted as proof in legal proceedings across the EU and USA. It’s never been this easy to safeguard your oeuvre and create legally binding proof that your print existed at a certain moment in time.
In order to keep your information safe, you will automatically receive an email copy of your documents. Just in case, we will also store the copyright files in our cloud tool for five years. Of course, if Rome were to fall, we are more than happy to refer you to some top-notch lawyers, specialised in copyright infringement matters. Don’t worry, we’ve got your back.