Start up DeCerts’ public position is that it “protects your digital work with cryptographic fingerprinting and Truvity-backed certificates” to “prove authorship” and monitor copying. It is a valuable application that goes beyond having to use meta data to prove it’s your creation or posting a parcel to yourself.
DeCerts matters because it gives creators a practical way to prove authorship, ownership, and provenance at the moment a work is created. In a digital world where art, writing, code, and research outputs can be copied instantly, that kind of evidence is not a luxury; it is the foundation of enforceable intellectual property rights.
The service is especially valuable because it focuses on early-stage protection. The World Intellectual Property Organisation’s own evidence-focused services are designed to help creators establish that a digital file existed at a particular time, which can later support claims about authorship and prior existence in disputes. DeCerts works along the same basic logic: it creates a verifiable record that can make ownership easier to defend if a work is challenged, copied, or misattributed.
That matters commercially as well as legally. Intellectual property only has real value if it can be identified, documented, and protected early enough to support licensing, fundraising, collaborations, and enforcement. For startups, artists, designers, universities, and research teams, the ability to prove who created what and when can be decisive in preventing disputes later on.
Imagine you have created the equivalent of a digital gem – giving a new meaning to the i in Koh-i-Noor. Such a creative imagining offers a powerful way to explain why provenance matters. The real diamond is famous not only for its history but for the fact that its ownership is disputed and its chain of title is contested across centuries and borders. That makes it a striking analogy for modern intellectual property: when provenance of the i diamond is clear, ownership becomes easier to assert, easier to defend, and easier to value.
If the Koh-i-Noor had been “registered” in a system like DeCerts, the historical controversy would not disappear, but the evidential trail would be much clearer. A record of creation, transfer, and asserted ownership would not resolve every moral or political claim, but it would make the document trail more reliable and the chain of custody easier to examine. That is exactly the kind of clarity creators need when they are trying to protect a work from misuse, misappropriation, or later dispute.
The larger lesson is that IP protection is strongest when it starts early. Once a work becomes valuable, the argument about who owns it becomes more difficult and more expensive to resolve. DeCerts’ value lies in reducing that uncertainty by turning creativity into evidence before the dispute begins.
For that reason, DeCerts is best described not simply as a tech product but as provenance infrastructure for modern creativity. In the same way the original Koh-i-Noor work shows how contested ownership becomes when history is opaque, DeCerts offers a way to make contemporary authorship clearer, more defensible, and more commercially useful. In the meantime create the jewels and the lawyers will follow.
DeCerts website – https://decerts.com/en
Read Felicity’s original article on the Koh i Noor here – https://www.easterneye.biz/whats-the-law-on-koh-i-noor/#google_vignette
Steffi Spitznagel is the Co-Founder & Chief Legal Officer at DeCerts
