Welcome to FirstRecord, a precedence registry that allows you to prove that you had a certain piece of information on a given date.
The purpose of FirstRecord is to allow you to release your texts, music, and ideas to the Internet without worrying that someone else will later claim authorship of your work. FirstRecord is not about copyright protection. Rather, it's about allowing you to choose any copyright you want — including copyleft or public domain — while still protecting your credit and your reputation. Once your work is registered in FirstRecord, you can allow people to copy and share it freely, yet still prove to anyone who doubts your authorship that you created it. Here's how it works:
Before you release your work for general availability, register it with FirstRecord using the form below. Enter your name, a brief description of the work, and the file containing the work itself. When you hit the Submit button, FirstRecord remembers the name, the description, the date and time of the submission, and a digital fingerprint (also known as a "hash" or "checksum") of the file. The digital fingerprint is computed using well-known and publically available algorithms, so it can be independently verified.
FirstRecord does not save a copy of the work itself — that's your job. After you've registered the work, you must save the exact copy you registered in a safe place, together with the name and description you registered it under. We recommend keeping multiple copies in different places, including at least one on a read-only medium such as CD-ROM.
If you ever need to prove to anyone that you were in possession of the work on a certain date, you return to FirstRecord and fill in the form again, leave the name and description blank, and upload your saved copy of the work. FirstRecord will confirm that the work has already been registered, and tell the date on which it happened. Because the digital fingerprint algorithm is one-way, only an exact copy of the original work could regenerate the same fingerprint again. (For now, to see all records in the database, just upload any file while leaving name and description blank.)
Note that you can use FirstRecord even to register "imprecise" works such as ideas and inventions. Simply write up the idea in a text file, then follow the procedures above. If someone later claims that you did not have the idea on or before the date you claim, show them the text file, then demonstrate to them that you can confirm FirstRecord registration for that file and date.
FirstRecord promises never to change any aspect of a record,
including the date, once it has been registered.
(But note that this promise is void while
FirstRecord is still in development, which it is as long as this
notice is here.)
Yes, you can overwrite records right now, so don't bother to try it:-). I'm going to fix that next.