Your work, your proof: Safe Creative and the future of copyright registration

In an era where generative AI can produce convincing text, images, and audio in seconds, the ability of creators to prove authorship of their work has never mattered more. That's the problem Chief Operating Officer Mario Pena and his team at Safe Creative are working to solve.

Safe Creative is a copyright registration and certification platform that gives writers, musicians, filmmakers, architects, software developers, and visual artists internationally recognized proof of authorship for their work. Using cryptographic fingerprinting, qualified timestamping, and daily audits on the Ethereum blockchain, the platform generates evidence that establishes exactly what was created and when. This protection holds up in litigation across any country signatory to the Berne Convention.

In November 2025, Safe Creative became the first private copyright platform to be recognized as an official Content Credentials Validator through the C2PA, a standards organization led by Adobe, Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, and other organizations and leaders working to restore trust in online content.

I sat down with Mario Pena to talk about why copyright registration matters even when copyright is technically automatic, how Safe Creative helps prevent or resolve copyright disputes, and how the company is implementing Content Credentials to introduce new authenticity safeguards and transparency in the content creation process.  

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Tell me a little about yourself, your career background, and what led you to your work at Safe Creative. What has been your relationship to creative work and copyright in the past?

In the last century, I was a computer technician, but I haven't been coding since 1996. Now my work involves company communication, licensing, strategy, and copyright issues.

I have long been an advocate for open internet culture and free and open licenses like Creative Commons. When that project was founded in 2007, I was very concerned about the situation for creators all around the world, especially when they have to negotiate with big companies. I got involved early because I wanted to be able to contribute my perspective as a former activist in that field.

I myself take a lot of pictures. I like to travel with my cameras all around the world, so I’m kind of an amateur photographer, although I’ve done some small professional works in the past. I guess I’m a very creative person: I like photography, music, movies, and all arts in general.

In your own words, can you describe what Safe Creative is and how it works to protect individual and organizational content?

Safe Creative is a LegalTech company that provides tools for creators and companies so that they can generate their own proofs of authorship or content ownership. The idea is to create timestamped proof of when the work was first created. Copyright protection technically exists from the moment that a creator creates the work, but there are instances in which someone may need to provide evidence, such as registration through a US copyright office, private registration like ours, or publication.

Creators can also certify their creative processes with Safe Creative while the work is being developed, for instance by uploading early drafts of a painting, or a video file while working on a sculpture. These files are also timestamped and registered as part of the documentation and history of the process of making a final creative work. With that, we create a certificate and several forms of proof that they can use in case they need to fight for their creative rights or if they would simply like to inform others about them online and in the physical world.

How does Safe Creative’s approach differ from traditional copyright offices or other registries?

The main difference is that it's very simple to use, it’s online, and you can do it from your computer or mobile phone. You don't have to answer a lot of complicated questions. With a flat rate subscription, you can register as many works as you want every day, whether it’s only one file or 1,000 files a day. You can certify all your creative processes, and all the certificates are available for immediate download. It’s also possible to integrate this with other services, so you can make an automatic registration for whatever you upload to Dropbox, or posts you may publish in a blog, for example.

The goal is to identify the work by the work itself, and we apply all the timestamps and redundancy needed to create strong proof. Safe Creative also strengthens its records with a daily audit process on the Ethereum blockchain, providing universal legal validity. Although it's not a government registration service, it can complement other services and it can be used in any jurisdiction.

What kinds of disputes or challenges are creators facing in a digital-first and AI-assisted content ecosystem, and how does registration help prevent or resolve them?

Often, people don't understand that they’re committing a copyright infringement. They take work without the proper consent, just because it’s available online. Most of the time, disputes are settled before going to court, thanks to our registration service. Lawyers have told us that settlements often happen the moment the other party is aware of the registration, because they know they can’t fight it.

There have been a few cases where creators have had to use their registration as evidence in court, but mostly as accessory evidence. Most of the time, our technology has been used to help later determine the settlement amount. 

How is Safe Creative implementing the C2PA standard?

Our first step was to become a Content Credentials validator. Simply put, if a file has a C2PA manifest in it, we display it on our public registration page and our Creators gallery. The Cr pin is displayed in the corner of the content — usually these are image files, but it will work when applied to any type of content. When you click the Cr pin you will see the information embedded in that file.

With Content Credentials validation as a key value, we want to foster awareness of the concepts of authenticity and provenance among creators and companies. It helps achieve a milestone of our core value proposal: to bring transparency against uncertainty in a user-friendly way.

What Content Credentials implementations are you working on for the future?

We are still in development, but the hope is to show Safe Creative registration information inside the manifest. In Safe Creative’s system, we have a lot of information about the work itself: the creator’s declarations or what the creator claims is related to that work. As a starting point, we want to be able to assert that a piece of work was registered with Safe Creative at a specific time. This would display alongside other information that would be optional for the creator to declare, such as AI training preferences.

Did you use any of the Content Authenticity Initiative’s open-source tools in your implementation? What challenges did you encounter?

We are using all the tools that the CAI provides. We had some smaller issues in the implementation during testing — the usual problems about something not displaying the way it should.

For instance, since registered files aren’t publicly downloadable, on the back end we use c2patool to extract the Content Credentials manifest from the registered file and save it as a separate file associated with the record. On the web front end, we use the JavaScript library to read the manifest data and display it in a pop-up on the record’s information page.
We initially implemented the viewer using the legacy library, and during the testing period we iterated on it to surface more and more information and to support special cases we encountered in registered files. 

In the end, we updated the code to use the new JavaScript library, which meant reimplementing some utilities — such as selectors like selectEditsAndActivity and selectProducer — that the legacy library provided more directly. We’ve also been updating the c2patool version to support different cases where it didn’t work correctly.

Another limitation we ran into with our implementation is that, since the viewer doesn’t have access to the original file, we can’t display any embedded thumbnails that might exist. For example, when showing information about ingredients.

Safe Creative has been recognized as an official Content Credentials Validator through the C2PA Conformance Program. Why did you decide to go through the process of conforming, and what was your experience like?

My personal motivation for bringing C2PA to the company was because I truly believe in the need for transparency and authenticity for all people on the internet, and that we have to bring this layer of security to digital content. I think the C2PA Conformance Program is essential  because we want to provide the best possible experience to everybody in the ecosystem and a standard to rely upon.

The process of the Conformance Program was quite straightforward, and we received proper support when needed. Once the initial form was filled, we were put in touch with the team at Google that sent us the files we would need to extract the Content Credentials from. We made the usual registration of the different types of works and tested the results.

During the first tests, not all information was shown correctly. We had to make some adjustments and then send the result to the Google team. They checked it, and found some issues that we corrected in a couple of days. After a couple more rounds of tests with the same files, we felt comfortable enough with the information that was being displayed in Safe Creative and our gallery, Creators. The team at Google checked everything and gave us the okay. After that, we sent the final form to the Conformance Program, informing them that the proper tests were successful. A few days later we were informed that our application got approved.

I can confidently say that our experience has been optimal. I’m being honest, I really love the people involved in C2PA and the CAI. You’re doing excellent work and you’ve been very helpful and inspiring from the very beginning.

Do you have any advice for others looking to go through the C2PA Conformance Program?

The advice is to go ahead and do it, because it's not intimidating at all. It's very simple and I think it's a good way to test the service that you're implementing. It's also necessary for more companies to get involved. This effort is critical for the future of the internet, and I would say for humanity as a whole.