In their April Issue, Popular Science published an article about “writing your masterpiece” and recommends you protect your copyright with Myows. I quote: “Once you write it, copyright it. Myows.com is a third party verifier that helps you defend against plagiarism. (…) if someone tries to rip it off (nb: your masterpiece), you’ve got airtight evidence that you’ve penned it first.”

Amber Leigh Turner is a freelance web designer who recently launched a community website aptly called Students That Freelance.

In yesterday’s article, Amber relates how she discovered through Statcounter that someone was using her work without her permission. She subsequently used Myows to have the copy removed and even received a letter of apology.

Are you wondering how that is possible? Then read her very well written article Why No One is Invincible from Copyright Infringement on StudentsthatFreelance.com

DISCLAIMER: I’m the one who recommended Statcounter to Amber. If you decide to give it a try, I need to warn you: Statcounter will bring out the voyeur in you and can become very addictive. For small to medium websites I personally much prefer it to Google Analytics, and I’m slowly recovering from my stataholic addiction.

The early reviews we received from Web Appstorm, Freelanceswitch and others were hugely insightful and encouraging, but we also want to know and share how independent creatives interact with our interface.

If you are still unsure if Myows is for you or how to use the app, I invite you to read these 2 recent reviews.

From Ben Ellis – Myows Free Online Copyright Protection:

My favorite quote from this article would probably be:
“I uploaded all my stuff yesterday and it was a total cinch.”
Read the full Review

From Signorina Navarra – Myows.com has got your back:

I’m unable to single out a favorite quote from this brilliantly concise and engaging review, so read it for yourself if you are not yet convinced about joining Myows.

If you run a blog and publish a post detailing how you like to use Myows, please let us know. We love hearing your opinion.

Here’s something to help you get started with the 4 STEP API CHALLENGE and bring you closer to tapping on your own iPad or spending 1000$ on whatever you desire.

Nettuts*, the most awesome online programming resource, published an extensive tutorial on how to create a Myows App.

If you’re the kind to dream in code, be sure not to miss it.

*For those of you web developers and designers who haven’t spent a little time on nettuts, you’ll want to check out their great tutorials and articles covering everything from age old tricks-of-the-trade to brand spanking new technologies (and no, they aren’t paying us to say this). If you’re looking to improve or augment your skills in HTML, CSS, Javascript, CMS’s, PHP or Ruby on Rails, this is the right place to start!

Take fuss-free copyright management to the next level.

Get your hands dirty with Myows’ publicly available API, fresh from the desks of our globally-scattered development team. This brings us one step closer to our platform-vision: helping the planet’s switched-on creative community help themselves. We’re looking for Myows members to help us add further functionality to the existing app at Myows.com. The brief is straightforward:

1- Use the new Myows API to develop a plug-in, add-on or stand alone application that assists other Myows members in registering, protecting and/or managing their rights

2- Develop this solution in a way that allow users to access key functionality in 4 steps or less

3- Implement your code and design with integrity, simplicity and elegance

We’re looking for plug-ins, add-ons and stand alone applications that improve the user experience and add useful functionality. To participate, you’ll need to create a thread before 15th May in our API forum category and provide a link to a demo of your app.

Fellow Myows users will have the opportunity to vote for their favorites from 15th till 31st May 2010. The winner takes home an Apple iPad (yeah, we’re self-funded!) and so does the runner-up (…yet generous!). We are also busy putting together a panel of industry heavyweights to award a jury’s grand prize of 1000$ to the app that best fulfills conditions 1,2 & 3 above.

Finally, any developer who creates an app we deem to be even vaguely useful and presentable will receive a lifetime Myows pro account (valued at over 1000$). Again – that’s just the kind of guys we are.

Feel free to create apps for resale (on Themeforest or CodeCanyon for instance) or build your own business on top of the Myows API. Obviously, we’d like you much more if you made your work available to the world for free, but we’ll get over it.

Feel free to run ideas and questions by the Myows team and other members by posting them up on the Forum. We are all here to help. Good luck. Be creative.

EDIT: Nettuts has published a video tutorial prepared by Dave:
How to Create an App with the Myows API (15 minutes).

2010 starts with a BANG! We got a great review and a grand 9 out of 10 rating from the very respectable and Envato-owned AppStorm.

As usual, there’s little point in us telling you how easy Myows is to use, and how useful the act of uploading your work is, instead we’d rather you go read the review and hear how others interact with the app.

I’ll quote part of the author’s final thoughts:

The overall user experience is pretty seamless and makes handling copyright actually somewhat pleasurable (which I thought was impossible).

Thank you to Jarel Remick @appstorm for the time you took to write this very detailed article. It’s a great start to the year for everyone involved with Myows.

We’re very happy about receiving this award. The competition was fierce; but in the end our copyright protection app won!

Thank you Top Site Tally for recognizing the value Myows brings to any creator’s work. We’re also very impressed with the review you wrote, as we never imagined Myows to be like a warm blanket, but we could get used to the idea!

This award is a very important milestone in Myows’s short history. It’s vital that creators take on the habit of registering their copyrights as soon as they create Original Work, and before showing their creations to peers or clients.

To promote this habit, we need influential websites to relay our message and help us grow the community of copyright-savvy creatives.

As we accept this award, we want to thank our families, our managers… and the Academy!

Sneh Roy is a web designer and the creative force behind the popular blog Little Box of Ideas.

Today, she describes her experience with Myows in the article entitled:
Universal Copyright And Protection Of Creative Work With Myows.

To mark the first review of Myows to be published on a designer’s blog, we are also running a give-away competition where you can win 50 Myows 1GB Accounts.

The LBOI website is truly original and gorgeous, so go check it out, I’m sure you will find something inspiring.

If you run a blog and want to publish a review of Myows, do not hesitate to get in touch.

A few months ago, web designer Matt Hill from Friskdesign interviewed me to find out more about Myows, and how I planned to create the first copyright management app.

Read the full interview on the friskdesign blog, as I believe it provides a valuable insight into how Myows was born.

As they sip cups of fresh, strong coffee in their small Cape Town office, Max Guedy and Chris Human chat animatedly about how their business plan took shape. Like many a good idea, myows.com (MYOWS as in: MY Original Works) – which provides members with hard evidence of their copyright – was born more out of necessity than from a strategically researched market gap.

In a rakish fedora and with a charming French accent, Max explains that he wanted to display his design and photography portfolio online, but discovered it was all but impossible to do so without making himself vulnerable to copyright infringement.

Chris, who speaks in quick, eloquent sentences and with obvious passion, knows first-hand what can happen when original work is not sufficiently safeguarded against copyright dispute. He lived through a legal battle over the corporate identity of his fledgling brand-building company, Engage Brandcraft. “We had put blood, sweat and tears into our work, but at the end of the day we had no proof that it was ours. Or at least, we had no decent evidence pointing to the fact that we had created our own work, evidence that would stand up in court,” he says.

Copyrights, Max explains, unlike patents or trademarks, are automatic and instantaneous. From the moment you design a logo, write a poem or compose a piece of music, you have copyright over that work. Upholding that copyright is, however, another matter.

Their experiences led the friends to two conclusions. Firstly, they needed to be proactive about protecting their creative work. And secondly, they needed a reliable third party – someone reputable and neutral to – back up their claims. Ultimately, they needed to link themselves, their work and the date on which it was created.

It was on an introductory IP law course they attended together that the challenge became especially apparent. The course lecturer could not provide a satisfactory answer to the question of how to prove exactly when someone was in possession of a particular work – the obvious question when there is an allegation of unlawful copying between two parties. (So-called ‘poor man’s copyright’, or sending a copy of your work to yourself through the post in order to have it marked with a date, does not hold its own in court). “This was our light-bulb moment,” recounts Chris.

And so they embarked on the development of Myows, online technology that would provide creatives with legally viable evidence of their copyright. The core function of Myows service is its date-stamping technology. Each time a member uploads their work to the website, a time-stamped copy is placed on a super-secure server. The precise time is recorded and attached to that document and a certificate is produced against this evidence. The certificate, document, date (and a hash-code for added security) are then recorded together on the server and backed up in a geographically remote location. Neither the date/time stamp nor the file is modifiable and the process is entirely automated.

This way, if you discover you work has been copied, you can take immediate action, hopefully resolving the case without having to resort to tedious traditional legal processes. Myows.com provides step-by-step guidelines (along with templates, advice and other useful resources) for dealing with cases of copyright infringement. But if you can’t settle the dispute through paralegal channels, you still have irrefutable proof from a neutral third party connecting you to work at precise moment in time, which will come in very handy when you’re standing in front of a judge.

“It’s not about playing God,” stresses Chris, who’s quick to point out that creativity is strongly linked to the zeitgeist, “And it’s not always about right and wrong”. Infringement cases are not necessarily as simple as out-and-out theft. A design, concept or style may gain currency, increasing the likelihood of similar work being produced in the same period by two or more people. With Myows, creators can simply present and compare certificates to resolve conflicts over authorship.

“It’s about providing a service we wish we’d had, with minimum fuss, in the context of a supportive community committed to the values of originality and authenticity,” concludes Chris.

It’s exactly this combination of simplicity and personal experience that defines the Myows system and has provided the two friends and entrepreneurs with solid foundation on which to build what could soon become an indispensible global service.