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Once a song is registered, how do you prove it existed that day

2026-09-20 · OpenStela

“Register it on the blockchain” is a sentence people nod at and do not picture. This post pictures it. One song, one diagram in three acts, and then the part that matters: what you can do with it six months later when someone says the song is theirs, or when a buyer asks what exactly they would be buying.

The example is deliberately ordinary. A singer — the diagram calls her Taylor — finishes a track called midnight-rain.mp3 on 8 September and registers it here on 10 September, under her own name, without a character attached to it. Nothing about the flow changes if the work is a video, a post, or an image, or if it is bound to a character; we come back to that at the end.

The whole path, top to bottom. Each act is taken apart below. Open full size →

Act 1 — the fingerprint, the card, the card's fingerprint

She uploads the file and fills in three things: the name the work is published under, the date she made it, and — if AI tools were involved — what she herself contributed. That last field is not decoration. In most jurisdictions only the human contribution to an AI-assisted work is protected at all, so the record asks for it up front and freezes it with everything else.

The platform never keeps a copy of the song for the record's sake. What it computes is a fingerprint: the entire file goes through SHA-256, a public formula every computer has, and comes out as a 64-character code. The same file always gives the same code; change one byte and the whole code changes; and the code cannot be run backwards into the file. The song stays on her disk. Whether it also appears on her public page is a separate switch she controls.

The fingerprint, the name, the dates and the contribution are then written onto one small card — the authorship record. She can download it, and it is what her public page shows. Then the card itself goes through SHA-256 once more. That second code, the fingerprint of the card, is the only thing that leaves her account. We call it a leaf, for a reason that becomes clear in the next act.

Act 2 — one tree a night, one root on the chain

Writing every card to a blockchain individually would cost money per card and scale badly. So every night the platform takes all the leaves registered that day — hers, everyone else's — and pairs them up: two leaves are hashed together into one code, those codes are paired and hashed again, and so on until a single code remains. That code is the root, and the structure is a Merkle tree. Change one character on any card anywhere in the batch and the root comes out different.

The root is what gets written into a transaction on Arbitrum One, a public chain whose clock is kept by thousands of independent machines. The transaction has a block time. That time is the thing nobody — not the platform, not the registrant — can move afterwards.

Along with the root, the platform hands her the proof path: the handful of sibling codes her leaf was paired with on its way up the tree. With the card, the path and the transaction link, she holds everything needed for the third act. They come together in the Proof Pack she can download from her work's page, as a PDF for people and a JSON file for machines.

Act 3 — months later, anyone recomputes four steps

Now someone claims the song. Or a buyer wants it and asks what the record is worth. Either way the check is the same, and it does not need OpenStela to still exist:

1. Hash the mp3 she holds. The code must match the fingerprint on the card.
2. Hash the card. The code must equal the original leaf.
3. Walk the proof path. Leaf plus siblings, hashed upward, must arrive at the root.
4. Open the transaction on Arbiscan. The root in it must be that root, and the block time is the date that counts.

Anyone can run these four steps with any SHA-256 tool. The verify page does them for you and shows the three layers separately — registered, anchored, verified on chain — because only the third one requires no trust in us.

What this proves

1. This original work went on chain at a given date and time, so it existed before then.
2. It was attributed to “Taylor Swift” at that moment.
3. Anyone claiming an earlier date has to produce their own evidence.

What it does not prove

1. Whether the song is good.
2. Whether it resembles another.
3. Whether she wrote it by her own hand. The registry records that an original work existed, not who actually made it; a record here can still serve later as evidence that you were the real creator.

Copyright exists the moment a work is created; nothing has to be registered for it to exist. What this registry does is show that a given work of yours already existed at a given moment, under your name. That is a narrower claim than “proof of ownership”, and it is the one that holds up.

What to keep

Three things, and the Proof Pack bundles the last two: the original file, unchanged; the card and its proof path; and the transaction link. Lose the file and steps one and two fail — the chain can vouch for a fingerprint, not for a song you no longer have.

Where a character comes in

If the work belongs to a character — a virtual singer's track, a VTuber's clip — she binds it to the character's registry number. That binding is a second card, naming the character, its specification version and the authorship record's fingerprint, and it goes through the same three acts on its own. The two dates then tell a story of their own: the work existed on the 10th; it was bound to this character on the 19th. The four pieces of evidence on the binding — timing, attribution, rights, exposure — are added on top, each as a dated record of its own.

Register a work →  ·  What a character ID proves →