Editor’s note (April 2026): This article is part of the Blog Herald’s editorial archives. Originally published in April 2009, it has been revised and updated to ensure accuracy and relevance for today’s readers.
Named graphic designer in 2009 Jon Engle he found himself in a surreal predicament. A stock art site accused him of copyright infringement, presented him with an $18,000 bill and began contacting customers to say his work “may have been stolen.” Engle maintained that the images were his own and that he uploaded them to the stock exchange site without anyone’s permission.
The case was further complicated by evidence suggesting that Engle was less than expected about the full picture. But regardless of how that dispute is resolved, the underlying situation it exposes has become even more urgent. In 2025, the internet is faster, content is more advanced, and the systems that prove you did something are still doing their job.
Especially for bloggers and independent creators, this is not a theoretical problem. This is a routine risk.
Why ownership disputes still persist
Content theft mechanisms have become more efficient, not less, over time. Images are deleted and reloaded at scale. Blog posts are syndicated without attribution. Illustrations appear in print-on-demand products that were never approved by the original artist. And increasingly, AI-generated images that bear similarities to the work of human artists are being used for commercial purposes, creating attribution disputes that current copyright law struggles to resolve.
The US Copyright Office has greatly expanded its online registration system since 2009, but the basics have not changed. For US creators, copyright registration remains the legal basis for enforcing your rights in court. You don’t need to register to own your copyright—it exists when the original work is fixed in tangible form—but without registration, your ability to sue for statutory damages and attorney’s fees is significantly limited. Current standard filing fees range from $45 to $65, depending on the type of filing, and while online filings are significantly faster, processing times for paper filings can still take months.
What registration gives you is initial proof of ownership. In dispute, that certificate burden changes. It doesn’t make your business bulletproof, but it does change the legal dynamic in a meaningful way.
The gap between creation and registration
Here we have identified a really practical problem: for most creators, there is a long and sensitive gap between the time a work is created and the time it can be officially registered. A blogger who publishes four articles a week will not register every work with the copyright office. A freelance illustrator who produces client work under tight turnarounds does not submit a document before each delivery.
This space is where property disputes live.
The non-repudiation services covered in the original article—services that timestamp and fingerprint your work through a third party—were a reasonable break in 2009. Some still exist. SafeCreative remains operational and continues to offer registration of content including text, images, audio and video. The basic concept remains the same: get a reliable, third-party timestamp on your work before it goes public so you have something to point to if questions arise later.
The wrinkle, also marked in the original article, is still worth noting. The platform’s timestamps — when you upload something to Flickr, YouTube, a portfolio site — can sometimes be edited by the user, undermining their usefulness as evidence. For a timestamp to have weight in a dispute, it must be tamper-resistant and independently verifiable. This standard excludes most blog post publication dates and most CMS metadata, which can be changed by anyone with admin access.
What has changed since 2009?
Blockchain-based provenance tools have emerged as a more recent attempt to solve this problem, particularly in the worlds of art and photography. services such as Verisart and the Content Authenticity Initiative, supported by Adobe, the New York Times and others, creates standards for embedding verifiable creator metadata directly into files. Adobe’s Content Credentials system, now integrated into Photoshop and other Creative Cloud tools, lets you add fake records of who created the file and when. It doesn’t replace copyright registration, but it solves the source question in a way that’s harder to dispute.
The situation is slightly different for writers and text-based creators. Platforms like Substack, Ghost, and Medium create their own time-stamped publication logs, but these are managed by third-party companies that may change policies. If you want reliable proof that you wrote something on a certain date, publishing on your own domain, indexed by search engines, remains the most reliable approach. Although Google’s indexing timestamps are not legally conclusive, they have been used as supporting evidence in plagiarism disputes.
Practical habits that protect you
Engle’s case is a good reminder that preparation is more important than response. Fighting to prove ownership after a dispute escalates is a more difficult position than building a paper trail from scratch.
For bloggers and digital creators, this means several things in practice. Register commercially significant work, especially images, illustrations, and any original writing you plan to monetize. For high volumes of content where individual registration is not realistic, consider group registrations — the Copyright Office allows you to register multiple unpublished works together, which greatly reduces costs and administrative burden.
Use tools that generate reliable, user-persistent timestamps. Uploading work to a service like SafeCreative before publishing costs almost nothing and takes minutes. If you’re producing visual work, explore Adobe Content Credentials or similar sourcing tools that embed creation data directly into files.
Keep your own records. Original project files, dated exports, version histories in tools like Figma or Lightroom, email threads with clients—none of this is a legal substitute for registration, but it creates a consistent picture of creation that can matter greatly in the court of public opinion, which is where most disputes are actually resolved.
The part no one wants to think about
Engle’s story has a complex coda. Later evidence showed that he did not create all of the controversial images from scratch. It’s worth sitting with because it adds a layer to the original lesson: origin systems only protect bona fide creators.
More practically, it’s a reminder that content ownership disputes are rarely clean. Stock sites, client relationships, collaborative projects, and creative tools all create situations where the lines around “who does it” can get really blurry. The best defense is to be clear about your workflow from the start – knowing what you’re building, where the source files live, and what a reliable audit trail will look like if you ever need to go into production.
The internet has never slowed down. Content still moves within seconds. The gap between creation and formal protection is still real and still exploitable. The tools to close it are better than they were in 2009 – but only if you use them.
