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Firstuse.com Is Guardian of Intellectual Property on Web

You’re in a band with your high school buddies and you’ve just written a song that you’re convinced has platinum potential. You record the song into MP3 and soon thousands are downloading it. Fantasies of a nationwide concert tour and hordes of screaming fans fill your head. But then you hear your song on your car radio, being sung by some band you’ve never heard of. How do you prove you had it first? Westlake Village-based Firstuse.com is hoping to be the answer. The company, which bills itself as the first Internet registry of intellectual property, gives digital files a time stamp and a unique fingerprint that holds up in court, all without requiring the user to divulge the file’s contents. “We built on a variety of technologies so that anyone with Internet access can instantly register their work,” said Chief Executive Cliff Michaels. “The technology is not new, it just wasn’t accessible before.” The company can stamp a date on any kind of computer file, no matter the size or format including video files, photos, graphic designs, documents, tax forms, music files and even Web pages. After opening an account with Firstuse.com, a user clicks on a file that he or she wants to register. Firstuse sends over a program that scans the file’s binary code (the file’s digital language). That generates a unique fingerprint (a string of numbers) that is sent back to Firstuse and stored, rather than the actual file. If the registered file is altered in any way, the original fingerprint will not match up to the file. In the coming months, Firstuse plans to add new software that allows users to keep an archived copy of the registered file in a read-only format on the computer, Michaels said. That would allow users to then continue to update the file, such as a screenplay, while keeping the original file intact. The fingerprint is stored for 10 years and can be renewed. With intellectual property becoming one of the hot issues online, Firstuse is seeing considerable growth, Michaels said. It is also drawing attention from the legal community. An article in Legal Tech Newsletter recommended Firstuse for use by attorneys as scientific proof of when a document was created. A Chicago court reporting firm, Victoria Court Reporting, signed on with Firstuse in September to register documents or depositions for clients, so they can validate that the document hasn’t been altered before going to court. In the next few months, Firstuse plans to expand its site to include legal advice, file-backup service, and services aimed at specific groups, such as screenwriters and lawyers. “They’re really a force to be reckoned with,” said Cliff Numark, director of the Los Angeles Regional Technology Alliance. “Intellectual property disputes occur all the time. What their system enables people to do is say, ‘I got there first.’ ” Firstuse isn’t alone in its field, but Michaels said the company’s competitive advantage is that it offers both a time stamp and file fingerprint, whereas most competitors offer either one or the other. When Firstuse launched in late 1998, most of the early users were lawyers, inventors and writers. The company has since branched out to court reporters, doctors and the general public for registering everything from a will to tax records. To register one file costs $15, but the per-file price drops to $5 or lower if several files are registered at once. For business users, Firstuse offers other special offers. The company was started by Michaels and Craig Honick, who had owned a Web-site development business together. The idea for the registry came after they were hired to design a Web site for an attorney, who asked how they were protecting it from copyright infringement. The two began seeking out an answer and found that the technology to protect the pages was there, just not in an easy-to-use format. In late 1997, they began shopping the idea around and got seed money to launch their idea. In October 1998, Firstuse went live.

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