But those are all my own personal happy feelings and pleasant thoughts, (probably a fair amount of ego in the mix too) shared only by my business partner and the most ardent of our team members. It’s not a public thing – at least it wasn’t until the wonderful folk at ‘ngage’ (ngage.co.za) got hold of us. (In fact their lawyers got hold of us, I like to believe they didn’t have the cojunas to call us themselves… makes you wonder). Anyway their lawyers charged us with copyright infringement and ‘passing off’ (pretending we were them: a mining PR consultancy based in another city) and hinted that we may be liable for criminal charges… we could land up in prison for our trespasses! At the time we had never heard of Ngage (complete with ‘funky’ spelling a la the 90s) and so  we bitterly contested their claim.

Now it’s fairly evident that our two logos look alike. They’re both in the commonly available font (Danube) and they both are based around versions of the English word “Engage” (although only one of them is correctly spelled). It is also apparent that both we and they (or their appointed designer) liked the “a” of the Danube font more than any other letter in the Danube alphabet. We created a meaningful device with ours and they used theirs to make a lovely rain pattern. Unlike the other guys though, I’m not going to cry fowl until I’ve talked everything over and got hold of the facts, I’m just saying that I don’t like what I see here. But here’s the thing that drove me nuts: it cost us about $2000 just to defend our own logo by responding with an equally unnecessary and vicious lawyers’ letter. And if we’d had to see this thing through to trial? We would be looking at upwards of $50,000. The only other alternative would be to close our doors or at least change our name and logo even though they were rightfully ours.

It was this very stressful, upsetting and time-wasting episode that taught me just how useless copyright law is to the man on the street if he’s acting alone. In fact, the way things work in reality can even end up costing little guys like us a fortune – just in a bid to ward off attack and prove that we are in the right.

Myows was started to put an end to all this kind of nonsense. The argument between us ultimately boiled down to who had their identity first. Again, I like to think it was us because as soon as we put a date to it (in our lawyer’s response), they ran away. But how cool would it have been to send them a C&D letter straight off the cuff. “Thanks for bringing your theft to our attention, we have proof that we created the logo on xx/xx/xxxx, so bring it on big boy…”

Myows is here so you don’t have to go through the same kind of ridiculous, expensive and draining ordeal that we did. It is because of this experience that we at Engage Brandcraft (with an E) protect our work religiously and rigorously. Please don’t wait till some ponsey twit steals your work and then tries to sue you before you do the same.

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.

For the 1 minute demonstration, I’m using a flyer I designed today, but it could as well be a logo, picture, or any kind of file.

The simple act of uploading my design guarantees that I have irrefutable proof of my date of possession in case an unscrupulous designer copies my work, then claims it as his own.

I could also upload sketches and source files as supporting documents, but that will be for another video!

I would love to see how you use Myows, so if you are able to record a screencast and upload it to Youtube, please let me know so I can link to it.

Other video demos

- Jonathan Bailey’s in-depth video review of Myows (12min)
- Myows tutorial videos

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!

Some are ridiculous, some are based on precedent but many I have just made up because I am feeling inspired.

If you have more suggestions or creative uses of Myows to share, just leave a comment.

Please remember that the real reason Myows is here is to protect and manage your copyrights.

If you really wanted, you could also:

1)   Get together with other Myows users and play the world’s most certifiable game of ching chong cha (rock, paper, scissors) by all uploading pics at the same time.

2)   Upload plain invitation text to an infringement-themed party then issue Myows certificates for everyone you want to invite (cocktail suggestion: Piracy Punch and/or Copyright Cosmopolitans)

3)   Create a remote backup of your most important files – upload all your most important working files so that you are 100% certain that they are safe and that you can access them from anywhere in the world that you may be.

4)   Create a reliable legal repository, keeping copies of all your most important legal documents (birth certificates, ID and passport, leases, contracts etc.), dated, verified, secure and in one place.

5)   Make a Point: Write down your secret thoughts to be revealed at a later stage and prove that you had those thoughts when you had them, even if nobody was listening (you get to say “I told you so” with proof and impunity… you get to be THAT guy).

6)   Set up an account under a friend’s name and upload the logos of the fortune 500, then send them all cease and desist letters (obviously don’t actually do this – you will be sued so badly that you will probably never recover).

7)   Store your passwords to other sites, bank vaults, secret societies etc. right here where you know nobody can touch them. You can access them from anywhere, search for them and keep them in dated batches for you reference.

8)   Upload a certificate as an original work and then issue a certificate for that certificate. Continue doing so until you get bored or your MacBook runs out of batteries. Then send this certificate and a snotty letter to anyone you know who is a little OCD.

9)   Upload a whole bunch of predictions separately (winning lotto numbers, World Cup play-offs etc.), delete the ones that don’t come true and then phone the media and tell them that you are the new Nostradamus and you have proof.

10)  Leave an uncontestable last will and testament complete with unalterable date – simply leave the access codes with your lawyer or in your secret safe.  You could also really surprise everyone here with eccentric naked pictures of yourself.

During infancy there was blue

Back in October 2008 the myows concept was in it’s infancy, and our mockup looked very different. We were then concentrating on defining what the app should do to help creatives with their copyrights, and slowly coming up with a corporate identity for our yet-to-be created start-up.

Chris, the branding expert of the team, submitted an early comp with this logo:

Albeit very different from the final result, I think it’s important to note that most branding elements from this early proposition have made it all the way to the current logo :

1. If you look around myows, you’ll notice a pronounced use of blue and white. This is directly related to the initial branding approach as seen on the early logo above. Blue expresses reliability, sociability, trust-worthiness and technology.
2. The blue bar under the letters OW, to symbolize the protection of Original Works.
3. Playful characters, because online apps should be fun to use
4. Lowercase typography

This was a very early mock-up, and as much as it looked professional, it doesn’t display properties that would allow it to be featured on logo design galleries, which I think is necessary to entrust logo designers into protecting their work with Myows.

So I took it one step further.

Childhood was about space exploration

One sunday afternoon I was sitting in my lounge and sketching furiously while my fiancée was watching reality TV.

I wanted to come up with a revised logo that would:

1. Make use of a mascot.
2. Incorporate the spirit of pioneering new territories, and of “being the first”.
3. Be both original and conceptual, as to maybe be featured in logo galleries.

For the mascot, I had a cat in mind, as phonetically the name “Myows” suggests cats. But I would need to give it some groove. And to get the spirit of pioneering I had 2 historical moments in mind: the Land Rush in the US, and the first moon landing.

I took inspiration from the Jamiroquai emblem I use to draw everywhere as a teen, and NASA pictures of Neil Armstrong (wether these were taken out in space or in a studio remains a debate):

And I came up with this sketch in November 2008:

Teenage years find their groove and deliver a promise

The partners agreed that the sketch represented a good direction to follow, so I started thinking about tracing it into a mascot.

At that time came out Smashing Magazine’s Showcase Of Clean And Minimalist Designs and I was immediately attracted to the graphic style on HUGE Inc.‘s header:

Following this boldly minimalist approach, we were able to display the Myows spacecat, our new mascot, on a very simple landing page in early December 2008:

This version did have a certain groove to it, but after a few months, as we were building on the core functions of the app, I realized that this first mascot lacked some boo-yah!, and I was too involved to come up with something fresh.

I firmly believe in hiring the best people for the job so I contacted one of the hottest illustrator and logo designer in the world to get outside help.

Our copyright app’s logo reaches design maturity

I’m a huge fan of Von Glitschka, and we were ecstatic when he agreed to take on this logo redesign project, while still keeping the initial branding elements.

The result was beyond my expectations, showcasing a custom typeface and a mascot with attitude that is both original and impressive.

We knew then that we had a winner, and the Myows logo is being featured on a growing list of leading logo galleries, including:

1. Creattica
2. Logomoose

Last year, my creative studio (Engage Brandcraft) was accused of stealing the intellectual property of a bigger, much more aggressive company who had in fact clearly stolen ours.

They threatened us with legal action if we didn’t ‘cease and desist’ with the flagrant use of our own original work (in this particular case, our name and logo – a very nasty allegation indeed). Trademark issues ensued – we were being accused of passing-off and copyright violations.

Goliath eventually gave in but not without a very expensive counter-threat from the lawyers on our side. Taking it to court would probably have cost in the region of approximately 50 000 USD. We came off lightly. Yet we’d done nothing wrong to start with! In time and money alone the exercise cost us well over 2000 USD. And let me assure you, we didn’t have that kind of money lying around. Similar predicaments face creators from all walks of life, daily, across the globe. Other “writers” steal our articles, companies turn our Youtube^® uploads into ads, bullies copy our logos and then accuse us of being the perpetrators.

But surely our original works are protected right? According to the law in most civilized nations, we all have inherent copyright[1] in our creations as long as they’re original and reduced to a physical form. Logos, website designs, paintings, books, songs, videos, poems, your childhood drawings, you name it – they’re all yours if you made them. You have automatic copyright for free and for nothing[2]. Congratulations! We even have the Berne Convention that regulates copyright laws between member countries (From the US to India, Brazil to the UK) so your copyright is global. So yes, that’s the spirit of the law.

The problem comes with implementation. The realization of justice tends to boil down to two things: time and money. Ironically, good creatives often have neither. Ergo: your copyright is essentially moot. You see, most of these cases are civil and many contestations will boil down to who was the author which, in-turn, will come down to the “burden of proof”. You’ll make claims, they’ll make claims, you’ll show them print-outs, they’ll claim you printed them yesterday, they’ll produce witnesses, you’ll try to get hold of a techie who can prove the date on your blog-post is accurate (which they won’t be able to do) and so it goes.

In fact you’ll be lucky if the judge even knows what a blog is. And you’ll do this all by yourself, or with your very expensive lawyer by your side. Not enough money, not enough time… waste of energy you reckon. So you leave it. Not exactly self-respecting. Hardly a just outcome. The obvious conclusion: the situation on the ground is totally unfair, imbalanced and something needs to change.

So – very much as a result of our unnerving experience – I joined forces with local designer, Frenchman and out-the-box thinker, Max Guedy along with technical genius Dave O. (in Singapore) and Scottish IT/IP lawyer Steve Ferguson to create Myows. That’s Myows (as in “my Original Works”)- a global network of smart creative’s who are looking to change the way our copyrights are upheld. At the heart of this growing community lies the Myows app – a site that helps members claim and manage their creations, protect their intellectual property and enforce their rights. It’s pretty, universally accessible, easy to use and secure. It’s available, free at www.myows.com.

Sites like this have the power to change the way we think about our rights and, in turn, reflect the pride we take in our creative works, whatever form they might take. The challenge is to start looking at copyright protection as a matter of simple, everyday discipline – like locking your car when you leave it parked in the street rather than waiting to have it stolen and then trying to track it down and suing the thief.

Logging, maintaining and managing your copyrights is smart. It’s also simple and free. I urge any creative who takes their creative work seriously to sign up. It is our hope that you’ll avoid ever going through the huge amount of BS, hassle, stress and unnecessary expenditure that we were forced to endure a year ago. It’s a waste. Trust me. Sign up any time and join smart creative’s from the world in saying enough is enough.

[1] From South Africa to France, India to the USA (17 U.S.C. §201)

[2] Except in the USA where you have to pay and then wait up to two years

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.

We are live, we’re in Beta and we’re ready to protect and serve with the most comprehensive set of free copyright management tools available.

Myows is more than an app, it’s a movement: forward-thinking global creatives who respect the originality and integrity of their work and expect others to do the same. It is our stated mission to reduce the incidence of online copyright theft by 20% by 2020.

We’re going to do it but we need your backing… starting today.

Sign up already!

If you haven’t set up an account on Myows, here are three really good reasons why you should:

1) Prevention is better than cure

myows makes it extraordinarily easy (and free) to protect your original works (OWs) as you create them, providing evidence of your copyright as you work: prevention is better than cure.

The upload process is super simple – you’re just a few clicks away from creating the copyright evidence you need! Get your myows account

2) A true one stop shop.

It’s also the world’s only total copyright management solution that we know of, allowing you to keep track of your copyrights, assign licenses, deter theft and pursue perps – all from a single (and sexy) platform.

In addition to assigning rights, attaching supporting documents and providing easy access to sound legal advice and templates, myows also helps you deal with infringements step by step, in a legally compliant way, for free. The software will even build a reliable case history for you as you progress.

3) Safety in numbers

You get to tap into a global network of talented creatives who have got your back wherever you are: .

Warn would-be perps that you’re part of Myows, you’ve registered and protected your work and that you’ll take action if your work is copied without your permission.

Expect this

The Myows blog is here to educate and enlighten myows users and cunning creatives the world over.

We’re here to know everything there is to know about our rights and how to protect our work without incurring massive legal bills or looking like a monkey.

We’ll also expose the odd content thief and style pirate and keep you updated on what’s happening in the riveting world of copyrights and intellectual property (someone’s got to do it).

Want to fully familiarise yourself with the free Myows app? Take a few minutes out of your day, turn on the left side of your mind and explore myows.com for a cool video intro, tuts, Q & As and a basic overview of what we’ve put together for you.