As Abraham Lincoln once said...
@jessewalden these types of systems tend to fail because you are NOT and cannot ever be a definitive copyright registry of record. As such the best you can say is "this user registered content with us on such and such time". Unless you are a Notary Public or a lawyer you cannot offer a service like that and stay within the bounds of the law. At least not in the USA.
Imagine if the actual creator failed to register with you. The content went viral and someone else registered the art with your service. You would be actively denying the actual creator of the content their money and you would be legally liable for any and all monies earned by the thief, because you are giving credibility to his claim when in fact you don't really know he made it, just that he had it and registered it.
I'm sorry to burst your bubble there guy.
Services like what you offer already exist and are too easy to game. They cost real content creators hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in lost revenues from simply trying to fight active denial registries.
What you describe though is exactly the type of system that causes problems like I describe here...
https://steemit.com/news/@williambanks/this-needs-to-stop-why-steem-will-win-in-the-battle-for-content-creators
I feel passionately about this because I used to be a musician, I had a ton music, some that I even released into the public domain. Someone took my original work, my entire CD that took me 2 years to compile and registered it with gracenote. They then sold the rights to a copyright troll.
Youtube pulled my account completely for copyright violations despite the fact it was ENTIRELY my original work and I could prove it. But gracenote claimed it was someone else's so it must be true right?
The couple of hundred dollars I was getting in ads from youtube didn't leave me with the resources to fight. I gave up and just quit music, what's the fun if I can't share it?
Copyright is just wrong minded in this day and age.
It doesn't serve it's intended purpose anymore. It doesn't encourage creators to create. It just robs the public domain for 100 years, assuming Disney doesn't get it extended to "forever minus one day" again like they almost did.
Patronage systems like we have here at steem and to a lesser extent, Patreon are the way forward. Creator is paid upfront what they earned and effectively releases the work to the public domain. If it turns out we have the wrong creator, well hell at least we know where the money went.
We already have a great method of limiting the damage here from stolen media. Cheetah, and he needs your help...
https://steemit.com/steemit/@anyx/an-open-letter-to-the-steemit-community-on-content-plagiarism-and-the-cheetah-bot
I implore you, if you see cheetah bot, always make sure to upvote him. @anyx is fighting a losing battle because he has to pay API costs for lookups in addition to server and hosting fees and content growth here is astronomical.
Cheetah works by actively scouting the web for content that is posted here and then automatically flagging posts that are straight up rips of content from other sites. That's the best way to control that sort of thing in here and @anyx has done a great job!
RE: What if Steemit could tell you the original creator of an image or article?