Logos, trademarks and signs are often used interchangeably as they were synonyms… which they are not! Registering a logo does not correspond to registering a trademark.
The term logo is an abbreviation for logotype: the graphic representation of a mark.
The trademark includes all the graphic and written elements (namely a pictogram + a word or logo) that, together with all the values conveyed by the company/entity at hand, identify the communication style of the brand.
The signage is in turn an instrument, in general a text of some sort, capable of identifying and signal to the public the place where a business is carried out.
The lawmaker laid down the registration as protection for trademarks and the patent to protect new technical solutions.

Pursuant to art. 12 of the L. 633/1941, a creative work is protected under copyright law. Such a protection confers upon the owner the exclusive right to publish the work and to economically exploit it in any form, whether original or derivative within the limits set out by law and, in particular, the right to copy, register, play, perform it publicly, distribute, translate or rent it.
Copyright on creative works originates from the very moment such works came to life and the law protects such works for the sole fact that they exist, regardless of any form of filing or publicity. Collecting agencies such as SIAE (Società Italiana degli Autori ed Editori) are in charge of populating and updating public registers where, upon filing an application, people may obtain a proof that a certain work was created on a specific date in time.
The economic rights in the work last for the whole lifetime of its author and expire at the end of the period of 70 years from the end of the calendar year in which the author dies.
Furthermore, regardless of the exclusive economic rights concerning the work, and even after their transfer, the author is still entitled to be acknowledged authorship thereupon and to oppose any distortion, mutilation or other changes and any action detrimental to the work at hand, that might compromise its author’s honour and reputation.

Copyright’s (please note that in civil law jurisdictions author’s right has a slightly different meaning) purview covers creative works of art. Laws protect creative works for the sole fact that they have been created, without need for filings or publicity. Copyright expires 70 years after the death of its author.

A trademark consists in a distinctive mark. Trademark’s owner’s rights are protected through registration in public registers (in Italy, the Ufficio Italiano Brevetti e Marchi – UIBM). The exclusive right to use the mark as to all the chosen classes of services/products vests in the owner upon registration, unless that trademark acquired such a popularity or significance as to access cross-class protection. The trademark expires if it is renewed or whenever it is not used for a period of five years.

A patent protects inventions from any technical industry which are new and capable of industrial application. To access patent protection, it is necessary to file a patent application at the UIBM (Ufficio Italiano Brevetti e Marchi). The protection granted under a patent lasts for 20 years and it is not subject to renewal. In conclusion, copyright protects creative/artistic works, trademarks distinctive marks and patents protect inventions. Hence, it is essential to choose the most suitable solution based on what one wants to protect. Blockchain, in turn, represents a valid tool to prove the moment a certain work was created.

The owner of a work may decide whether reserve all rights, moral and economic, as set out under any applicable laws on copyright, under the traditional formula “all right reserved” or forfeit those rights specifying the wording “no rights reserved”. Alternatively, the author may decide to forfeit only part of such rights choosing a “Creative Commons” license (“CC Licenses”) to allow for sharing his/her works according to the scheme “some rights reserved”. Under such CC Licenses it is possible, for instance, to give the consent to using your work, as long as the author is credited (BY option) or inasmuch as the work is not used for commercial purposes (NC option). Authors may choose the CC License that better suits their needs and, if they want to “display” their choice, they can place the icon (directly on the work or on the website hosting such work or as an attachment to the e-mail, etc.) corresponding to the type of CC License displayed on their works.

Please note that the choice of the type of CC License is exclusively on the author. The author does not have to ask for permission neither to CreativitySafe nor to Creative Commons, though the author shall take into account that, once he/she has chosen a specific CC License for that particular work, such choice will not be revocable.

Here follows a list of the most common types of CC Licenses including a short description thereof:

1. “Public domain” license

2.License “CC” – “BY”

This license requires MANDATORY ATTRIBUTION (BY): whoever wants to use, modify works of others – or create derivative works thereof – also for commercial purposes, must only acknowledge authorship to the author.

3. Licenza “CC” – “BY” – “NC”

This license requires MANDATORY ATTRIBUTION (BY) and NON-COMMERCIAL USE (NC): whoever wants to use, modify works of others – or create derivative works thereof – must acknowledge authorship to the author but cannot use them for commercial purposes.

4. Licenza “CC” – “BY” – “ND”

This license requires MANDATORY ATTRIBUTION (BY) and NO DERIVATIVE WORKS (ND): under this license, it is possible to use for commercial purposes a work acknowledging authorship to the author, but it is not possible to change/modify such work.

5. Licenza “CC” – “BY” – ND” – “NC”

This license requires MANDATORY ATTRIBUTION (BY), NO DERIVATIVE WORKS (ND) and NON-COMMERCIAL USE (NC): under this license it is possible to use a work acknowledging authorship to the author, but it is not possible to change/modify such work or use it for commercial purposes.

6. Licenza “CC” – “BY” – “NC” – “SA”

This license requires MANDATORY ATTRIBUTION (BY), NON-COMMERCIAL USE (NC) and SHARE-ALIKE (SA): under this license it is possible to use, change or modify a work acknowledging authorship to the author, but it is not for commercial purposes, furthermore the new work may only be distributed under a license identical to the license that governs the original work.

Transactions get recorded with the blockchain, not files. The single transaction is composed of a string of text containing essential data, such as the sender and the content. For storage space reasons, the string is limited. Therefore, if the content in the transaction is a file, such transaction will not contain the whole file, but only a code capable of univocally identifying it, and to this end, cryptographic hash functions are used to produce such code.
The hash is the output resulting from the process of using a cryptographic function where the input consists in the very file that has been uploaded. Each file produces its own hash and there are no possibilities that two files originate the same one. It is no coincidence that the hashes are often compared to human fingerprints. With regard to hashes, as well as to human thumbprints, it is not possible to trace back the content of a file from the hash assigned to it. Different hash algorithms are available. The one we use is the SHA256, the same used by Bitcoin’s blockchain. To give an example, if we apply SHA256 to the word “CreativitySafe” we get the following hexadecimal number:
FBEE2120FE763E1393F0C8F1CC9CC269A07D62B018B7CD8EF590898C58439D70
It only takes to change the capital letter to a lowercase to obtain a completely different number. For example, the hash of “Creativitysafe” is:
B0A83E9FCC2684B9972BA9D8CD5E8D5E2E7B3B4039BF9229ABEA722E91B24AB1
In summary:
– Any digital content input in the hash function returns an alphanumeric code. It is not possible to trace back what is inside such digital content out of such code, the same way it is not possible to infer the hair colour or the height of a person from his/her fingerprint;
– Adding a blank space to a document, changing the position of a single comma or its extension would result in a different composition of the bits of the file which would then return a different hash, but the same file fed in the same hash function will always return the same alphanumeric code, in any computer and in any time it might be processed.
– Only the hash is uploaded on the blockchain, not the file. This allows for saving a lot of storage room and makes transactions absolutely confidential

We employ blockchain technology because, thanks to its functioning specifics, it provides an easy, economic and safe method to date with precision the moment a digital content has been registered, without needing to resort to any authority or institution.
The choice of a distributed technology that does not rely on the trust of an external authority is not just “philosophical”. Indeed, it means that no space or time limit is set to its use for certification purposes. Its validity is not linked to a company’s lifespan or to the borders of a jurisdiction. In any part of the world, it only takes to access the internet to verify whether and when a document has been registered with the blockchain and by whom. And there are not time limits too: as long as the bitcoin’s blockchain lasts, its records will continue to exist.
This is why, of all the available blockchains, we chose Bitcoin. In case of “private” blockchains, in fact, the survival of the registration is connected to the lifespan of the companies or institutions that host the database on their servers. As per those public blockchains, the risk is that, once the interest surrounding them dies down, nobody feeds them anymore making it impossible to retrieve the information registered therein. On the contrary, we believe Bitcoins will be the cryptocurrency par excellence for many decades to come and, as a result, its blockchain will continue to be fed for a period long enough to cover the over-ten-year horizons assigned by the law to the protection of intellectual property rights, which is however more than that of any other company operating in the storage of digital documents.
In short, the reliability of the legal timestamping procedure is based on the fact that all the transactions recorded with the blockchain follow a chronological order. The unambiguity of this timestamped ledger is guaranteed as the ledger containing all the transactions is distributed and copied on the computer of anyone willing to become a node of the network. The unchangeability of the contents is guarantees by the use of common cryptographic techniques embedded in the Bitcoin’s protocol.

The interest of the European Parliament in the blockchain is huge and, obviously, its scope is not limited to the sole protection of copyright. Keeping in mind that, in the technical jargon, DLT means “Distributed Ledger Technology”, that is a use of the blockchain (like CreativitySafe does) to record public or private documents without the ledger being held by a public institution or by a private company, the October 3, 2018 Resolution reads as follows:
“The European Parliament…”
22. Underlines that for ‘digitalised’ creative content, DLT can enable the tracking and management of intellectual property and facilitate copyright and patent protection; emphasises that DLT can enable greater ownership and creative development by artists through an open public ledger that can also clearly identify ownership and copyright; highlights that DLT could help link creators to their work, thus enhancing safety and functionality in the context of a collaborative and open innovation ecosystem, especially in areas such as additive manufacturing and 3D printing;
23. Notes that DLT might benefit authors by bringing more transparency and traceability to the use of their creative content, as well as cutting down on intermediaries, with regard to them receiving payment for their creative content.

The European lawmaker has foresightedly intended to foster technological innovation in the field of timestamping and of the so-called digital forensics with the EU Regulation no. 910/2014 (called eIDAS Regulation) on electronic identification, authentication and trust services in the internal market (a regulation which directly enforceable also in Italy).

The timestamping services offered by CreativitySafe with Bitcoin’s blockchain is an Electronic Time Stamp according to EU Regulation no. 910/2014.

Since it allows the owner to prove the moment certain contents subject to registration were created, our certification falls into the definition of Electronic Time Stamp as “data in electronic form which binds other data in electronic form to a particular time establishing evidence that the latter existed at that time” (art. 3, no. 33 of the EU Regulation no. 910/2014).

As a consequence of the EU Regulation no. 910/2014, the time stamp certificate offered by CreativitySafe is acknowledged as a suitable mean to prove authorship and the date of existence in judicial proceedings, established for example as a result of illegitimate attempts to claim ownership on the certified contents, also considering that art. 41(1) of the EU Regulation no. 910/2014 specified that “an Electronic Time Stamp shall not be denied legal effect and admissibility as evidence in legal proceedings”.

The Italian lawmaker did not remain idle either and, in fact, on February 11, 2019, it passed an Act, the Legge no. 12, which converted the Decreto Legge no. 135 issued on December 14, 2018, also introducing the new article 8-ter to the previous text of the Decreto Legge, on Technologies based on distributed ledgers which reads as follows:

“Art. 8-ter Technologies based on distributed ledgers and smart contracts

1. “Technologies based on distributed ledgers” are to be intended as all those technologies and computer protocols using a shared, distributed, replicable ledged which can be accessed simultaneously, whose architecture is decentralized based on cryptographic keys such as to allow for the registration, validation, update and storage of data plainly as well as further protected by cryptography verifiable by any participant, unchangeable and unmodifiable.
2. A “smart contract” is a computer program operating on Technologies based on distributed ledgers whose execution automatically binds two or more parts based on their predetermined effects. Smart contracts meet the required written form upon identifying the parties involved through a process meeting the requirements set out by the Agenzia per l’Italia Digitale with guidelines to be adopted within 90 days of the implementation of the Legge converting the decreto-legge.
3. The storage of a digital document through the use of technologies based on distributed registers produces the legal effects of the electronic time stamp referred to in Article 41 of EU Regulation no. 910/2014.
4. Within 90 days of the implementation of the Legge converting the decreto-legge, the Agenzia per l’Italia Digitale identifies the technical standards that the technologies based on distributed ledgers need to possess to produce the effect referred to above under paragraph 3”.

Pursuant to the third paragraph of such article then, the legal validity of the Electronic Time Stamp applied to documents processed over transactions on the blockchain has been – also domestically – acknowledged.

It must be noted though that – to date – it is necessary to wait for the technical standards referred to under paragraph 4 of such article, to understand what technologies based on distributed ledgers may access the legal effects of the electronic time stamp.

Our solutions allow you to protect your intellectual property by using a method that is complementary to and not a substitute for those provided for by regulatory procedures (e.g. patent application or trademark registration, filing in public registers of the SIAE: see answers to specific FAQs).
Instead of following the standard registration proceedings, our certification procedure uses timestamping techniques on the blockchain. It therefore represents a piece of evidence that can be used to prove ownership and the existence of your work on a specific date.
Hence, it might be used not only if your creation does not fall into the typical intellectual properties provided for by the law, but also to supplement the official registration during the preliminary steps of a creative processes and before accessing official protection with the trademark and patent office.
In other words, the registration of the creative content with the blockchain represents a piece of evidence that might be used to prove authorship and to legally timestamp the moment a work was conceived. Even in the event your creation requires a “higher” level of protection as those that as of today only public registers may provide with regard to trademarks and patents, in the preliminary phase of the creation or while the registration is pending, it might be useful to resort to a fast and economic service such as ours to set a preemptive and temporary line of defense on your right in the work, in particular to prove the existence on a certain time of a content of the trademark or of the patent to come.
In short, the certification service offered by CreativitySafe is not equal to registering a trademark or being granted a patent, as the sole entity in change of protecting such intellectual properties under the Italian law if the Ufficio Italiano Brevetti e Marchi. Furthermore, there are already other public registers kept by SIAE which can be accessed by registering one’s own creative work to entrust SIAE with the task of collecting the copyright proceeds thereupon.
If, on the contrary, you want to protect the graphic content of a trademark or of an industrial design with artistic features (as required by copyright law to access the protection granted by the copyright for the ID) or, in general, a creative work, it is possible to use our service to certify the date in which that work was created and the evidence that your works, meaning creative work of art, had been used in order to ascertain its ownership.

CreativitySafe’s certification service is not to be intended as a substitute for the registration of a trademark or of an industrial design, nor of the patent for an industrial invention. As it concerns Italy, the Ufficio Italiano Brevetti e Marchi is therefore still the exclusive entity entitled to receive applications for obtaining intellectual property certificates, and to verify the formal and technical compliance of such applications.
In any case, over the preliminary phases of a creative process and before the official registration, it might come in handy to resort to a fast and economic service such as ours to acquire evidence of the creation of a work and consequently defend the authorship rights in the content right from the start.
Our date-certification service, in fact, allows you to prove your rights in the content, such as the graphics of a logo or documents/blueprints connected to the creation of an invention which might be protected under a patent. Indeed, our certification procedure, relying on a timestamping technique on the blockchain, offers a mean to prove the ownership and the existence of your work in a certain date in time.

The certification service offered by CreativitySafe does not come as a substitute for the registration of the works in the public registers held by SIAE (or a similar company) for the purpose of handling the collection of the royalties. SIAE, in fact, operates as an intermediary to manage the economic rights connected to a creative work of art and to this end it assigns to third-party subjects the authorizations to use the protected works on behalf of the authors, collects the royalties and allots the proceeds in its capacity as a copyright collecting agency. CreativitySafe does not do this.
CreativitySafe is instead a valid alternative to filing original works with the SIAE’s register, which – like ours – is meant to legally timestamp unpublished works. CreativitySafe carries out the same function, but, contrary to SIAE’s filing services, it is cost-effective and does not require renewals.

Compared to the traditional instruments, the benefits of blockchain certification cannot be denied.
– Certified e-mail (PEC) requires both the sender and the recipient to hold a certified e-mail account, otherwise the system will not return an e-mail acknowledging the delivery. This is not a foregone conclusion, for example, when dealing with foreign third parties. Using a certified e-mail, you shall also keep the receipts generated by the provider. Furthermore, whether the attachments to a certified e-mail are themselves deemed certified by sending the e-mail is not an undisputed matter.
-Posting a registered mail, apart from requiring many practical steps, comes with all the disadvantages of any paper-based system. Once the letter gets lost, in fact, the time stamp is forever lost too.
-It is no use to talk of the costs you would need to bear to have your document notarized by a notary public, as well as of the necessity to keep the documents in paper and the impossibility to provide an evidence of the registration in a fast and smart way;
-You might also have a tax stamp obliterated. Any public official is entitled to legally timestamp by stamping a document. Such method though, apart from being intricate might also not be possible. Public officials are not always available to provide this service without being dictated to by a precise other of the public authority. Also, in this case then, it will be necessary to keep the documents in paper.
With CreativitySafe, you will not need certified e-mail addresses, nor keep paper documents or bear expensive costs.
You will be able to verify the firm date of your document worldwide simply by accessing an internet connection and all of your documents will be timestamped easily and safely. The service we provide is fast, safe and economic.

Compared to other timestamp systems, CreativitySafe, using bitcoin’s blockchain, eliminates the problem of the duration of the timestamp, as our validation is potentially infinite and without an expiration date.

Once you filled out the form, our platform will group the files you uploaded in a .zip format file and register it on the Bitcoin blockchain. At the same time, we will make a second registration dedicated only to the file that you have indicated in the uploading process as the Primary Object of Protection. For the registration on blockchain we decided to use the protocol developed by “Opentimestamp.org”.
Once carried out the registration with the blockchain, our procedure involves the issuance of a certificate with the digital fingerprint of the file (“hash”) recorded with the blockchain, the date/time when the registration took place, the identification number of the transaction on the blockchain and the address of the block in which the transaction has been stored. The certificate is accompanied by a utility file (with .ots extension, developed by Opentimestamp.org), which can be used together with the original files to verify in a simple and autonomous way the registration. Please note that:
– there is no relationship or latent conflict of interest between CreativitySafe and the developers of Opentimestamp;
– this operation can be carried out anywhere in the world, accessing either our site or any other site that has access to the Internet.
In addition to the .ots file, we provide a .txt file detailing all the steps necessary to “manually” reconstruct the path that from the hash of the original file leads to its registration with the blockchain.
Obviously, we will notify you by email when everything is ready (within max 48 hours of filling out the form). At that point, you can download everything to your computer or continue to keep it on our website, in the cloud storage section.

There are basically two ways to check whether your documents are on the blockchain. The first, the easiest and most immediate way is based on the utility file (with .ots extension) that will be delivered along with the registration certificate in your Private Area of the site. Just upload this file and the original on the web page that you will have access to on our site and you will immediately find out if and when the original file was registered with the blockchain. Alternatively, you can connect to one of the many websites that use the Opentimestamp standard and perform the verification following the same procedure.
A second way, however, involves direct verification on the blockchain. In this case, you will have to use whatever blockchain explorer interface available on the internet, manually enter the data contained in the registration certificate (block number, hash of the root of the Merkle tree in which the original file was inserted) and perform the verification. Apart from that, you will have to verify that the hash of the original file belongs to the Merkle tree whose root is present in the transaction on the blockchain. It is a bit time consuming but feasible thanks to the .txt file that you will find in your Private Area of the site and where we will have described in detail the entire procedure, that from the hash of the file leads to the transaction on the blockchain.
In any case, in the technical section of our website, you will find all the instructions to carry out the verification in both ways. Please note that during the verification operations only open-source software, available for free on GitHub and written in the languages Python and Javascript, is used. We reaffirm that the utility file (with the .ots extension) is generated by Opentimestamp.org in total absence of conflicts of interest.

The purpose of CreativitySafe is to provide the customer with all the elements necessary to prove the existence of an artistic creation or of an invention at a certain date. This might come in handy should our customer be called to prove its originality or use in a dispute.
However, it should be specified that the registration with the blockchain does not automatically result in the attribution of the authorship on the work. In other words, neither the blockchain nor CreativitySafe can find out if the work has been copied or misappropriate. The registration with the blockchain can only prove that you were in possession of the file representing the work on a certain date.

The registration with the blockchain, besides being inviolable, is not even subject to the passing of time. This means that you just need to keep your registration’s receipt to be able to prove at any time in the future that at that particular date the work was in your possession and that it was you that registered it on blockchain using the service offered by CreativitySafe.

There is no time limit on the validity of the registration. Once the transaction has taken place, the registration will remain forever in the blockchain. The presence on the decentralized register continues to be guaranteed even in the event of termination of our service. When and if we should no longer be there, it is sufficient that you do not lose the registration certificate (with the data to verify it) or …. the original file.

In other words… A CERTIFICATION ON THE BLOCKCHAIN IS FOREVER!

The answer is no. The truthfulness of any previous date that you might add to the supporting documents registered on blockchain should be verified with the traditional methods of investigation. For this reason, we recommend that you make your registration with the blockchain as soon as possible, especially when the work is still a draft. Thanks to the cost-effectiveness of the service it is possible to figure out solutions which would be impossible using the traditional and costly traditional protection means.