HAVEL & PARTNERS as a legal service innovation leader introduces Certoo, a new service providing indisputable and secure proof of authorship

13. 12. 2021

The law firm HAVEL & PARTNERS has responded to clients’ needs and introduced another innovative solution. Under the brand named Certoo, it offers a unique opportunity to obtain indisputable, secure and immutable proof of authorship of documents and data. Certoo protects ownership with an irrefutable blockchain time stamp and ownership certificate, which could also be used as valid evidence in court in the future.

The Certoo project is the result of cooperation between the law firm and ARTinii Production, a technology company, aimed at bringing state-of-the-art solutions to the legal issues in IP law that HAVEL & PARTNERS encounters in its practice.

“Efficient prevention of copying or imitation of a work is extremely difficult nowadays. In practice, we evidence how difficult our clients often find it to prove they are the authors of a certain work. Certoo intends to address this issue with the help of blockchain, a state-of-the-art technology tool. We are a leader in legal services innovation and since we enjoy the synergy of law and technology and see a huge potential in it, we have created this joint blockchain project,” explained Robert Nešpůrek, a partner in the law firm.

Though Certoo accounts, clients will have access to their private storage and be able to upload any file or folder they seek to protect. Certoo will encrypt the files and save their digital records as encrypted codes on the blockchain.

Blockchain makes it possible to protect the authorship to digital works as well as and non-digital works converted to digital form. These can typically include photographs, architectural designs, pieces of music or other sound recordings but also texts, e.g., articles, agreements, papers or last wills.

Blockchain is a technology consisting of interconnected data blocks. Given the chaining of blocks, it is virtually impossible to tamper with the data in the blockchain, ensuring strong protection of the uploaded data. The authorship imprint in the blockchain therefore safeguards secure and provable protection of copyright work.

The authorship on the blockchain is proved by a blockchain certificate. It contains the author’s identification data (name, address, year of birth, etc.), information on data recorded on the blockchain and the certification date. These data make it possible to prove that a certain file was indeed in your possession at the time concerned. To conclude, Certoo is a simple online tool enabling quick and simple certification of ownership of any digital files.