This article examines two pivotal decisions that collectively signal a significant evolution in evidentiary standards for copyright protection. The Tribunal Judiciaire of Marseille's ruling of March 20, 20251, and the U.S. Copyright Office's determination of January 30, 2025, though emerging from distinct legal traditions, reveal a convergence in their approach to evidence.
The French decision marks a watershed moment in French intellectual property litigation by formally recognizing blockchain timestamps as admissible evidence in establishing the existence and creation date of fashion designs. Meanwhile, the American decision breaks new ground by accepting comprehensive digital documentation—including time-lapse video—as proof of human authorship in AI-assisted creative works.
Despite their jurisdictional and subject-matter differences, these rulings share a common thread: both embrace innovative technological solutions to address fundamental evidentiary challenges in copyright law. The French court validates blockchain's immutable record-keeping as proof of anteriority, while the U.S. Copyright Office acknowledges the value of video process documentation in demonstrating human creative contribution.
This parallel development suggests an emerging international consensus: as creative processes become increasingly digital and technologically mediated, evidentiary standards must evolve accordingly. By analyzing these complementary approaches, this article proposes a framework for understanding how blockchain technology might serve as a particularly powerful tool for documenting both the existence and human authorship of works in our increasingly digital creative landscape.
The decision of the 20th march 2025 by the Tribunal Judiciaire of Marseille arose from a copyright infringement dispute between two entities in the fashion industry. The plaintiff, AZ Factory, brought action against a clothing wholesale distributor named Valeria Moda operating throughout southern France.
The plaintiff, AZ Factory was established as a joint venture between renowned fashion designer Alber Elbaz and the Swiss luxury group Richemont. Founded shortly before Elbaz's untimely passing in April 2021, the brand represented the culmination of the designer's illustrious career. Elbaz had previously built an exceptional reputation in haute couture through his contributions to prestigious fashion houses including Guy Laroche and Yves Saint Laurent. Most notably, his fourteen-year tenure as artistic director at Lanvin had established him as one of the fashion industry's most influential creative voices.
The brand's collections "Love from Alber" and "Hearts from Alber" carried particular significance within the fashion community, representing some of Elbaz's final creative works. These designs embodied his distinctive aesthetic sensibility.
The defendant, Valeria Moda operated as a wholesale distributor supplying various retail channels—including boutiques, markets, and other outlets across southern France—with what AZ Factory alleged were unauthorized reproductions of its protected designs.
The litigation arose when AZ Factory alleged that Valeria Moda had infringed upon its intellectual property rights by producing and distributing clothing that incorporated distinctive design elements from the "Love from Alber" and "Hearts from Alber" collections. According to AZ Factory's claims, the defendant had created unauthorized reproductions of these protected designs and distributed them commercially through its extensive wholesale network in southern France.
What distinguished this case from conventional fashion copyright disputes was AZ Factory's evidentiary approach. To substantiate its claims, the company presented digital evidence secured through "BlockchainYourIP," a specialized platform that leverages distributed ledger technology to create immutable, timestamped records of creative assets.
This blockchain-based documentation provided AZ Factory with a chronologically verifiable record of its designs' existence—including digital fingerprints of sketches and finished clothing images—establishing both the creation date and specific characteristics of the works in question. This innovative approach to securing evidence would prove pivotal to the court's ultimate determination regarding copyright infringement.
In its ruling, the Tribunal Judiciaire of Marseille explicitly validated blockchain technology as a legitimate evidential tool for establishing creation dates in intellectual property disputes. The court specifically accepted blockchain timestamps as conclusive proof of anteriority—determining that AZ Factory's designs demonstrably existed prior to the alleged infringements. The blockchain records, dated May 5, 2021, and September 15, 2021, provided critical temporal documentation that established the chronological precedence of AZ Factory's creative works.
The court noted that the blockchain evidence presented was further reinforced through certification by a huissier de justice (court bailiff)2, creating a dual verification system. However, what makes this decision particularly noteworthy is the court's direct reliance on the blockchain timestamps themselves as primary evidence. The bailiff intervened at the plaintiff's request to facilitate the adoption of blockchain evidence by judges unfamiliar with this technology. However, the court specifically relied on the blockchain timestamps (May 5 and September 15, 2021) rather than the bailiff's certification dates to establish the existence of the creative works. This distinction clearly demonstrates that the Marseille tribunal recognized the blockchain records as independently valid evidence, capable of establishing temporal priority without requiring traditional legal intermediaries.
Prior to this decision, French jurisdictions had not formally acknowledged blockchain as admissible evidence in intellectual property disputes. While the court's recognition of blockchain's time-stamping capability is unsurprising - given that entries are validated by network participants at precise points in time3 - it is nonetheless significant. This function allows blockchain to serve as proof of the prior existence of a copyrighted work.
This decision by the première chambre civile of the Tribunal Judiciaire of Marseille opens new pathways for leveraging blockchain technology across various creative industries, substantially enhancing legal certainty and efficiency in IP rights enforcement. Blockchain's acceptance as a reliable evidential tool offers creators significant protection against counterfeiting and infringement, potentially influencing future jurisprudence in France and fostering broader adoption in intellectual property law and beyond.
The Marseille Tribunal's recognition of blockchain evidence represents not an isolated development but rather France's alignment with an emerging international legal consensus. This ruling echoes similar judicial determinations in jurisdictions like China4, where courts have already established precedents accepting blockchain records as admissible evidence in intellectual property disputes. By formally acknowledging blockchain timestamps as reliable proof of anteriority, the French judiciary has positioned itself within a progressive global movement toward technologically-enhanced evidentiary standards.
The significance of this decision extends considerably beyond traditional copyright enforcement. Blockchain technology's capacity to create immutable, chronologically verifiable records offers transformative potential across the entire spectrum of intellectual property protection. Particularly noteworthy is its application to trade secret protection, where establishing the existence, scope, and maintenance of confidentiality for intangible assets has historically presented formidable evidentiary challenges. Blockchain's tamper-resistant documentation provides rights holders with unprecedented ability to prove precisely when specific information was developed and placed under protection.
In contemporary creative environments where multiple contributors—spanning both human creators and algorithmic processes—frequently participate in work development, conventional documentation methods reveal significant limitations. Traditional approaches often fail to capture the nuanced interplay between human direction and technological execution, particularly in AI-assisted creation where the boundaries between human and machine contributions can appear indistinct.
While blockchain clearly demonstrates value in establishing the existence and temporal priority of creative works, a critical question remains: what specific evidence should be recorded in blockchain systems to effectively demonstrate human creative contribution? As AI assistance becomes increasingly sophisticated, distinguishing protectable human creativity from non-protectable machine outputs grows more challenging.
The exploration of this crucial question—determining precisely what constitutes sufficient documentation of human creative input in technologically mediated processes—forms the focus of our examination of the U.S. Copyright Office's groundbreaking decision in the following section.
In a decision dated 30 January 2025, the U.S. Copyright Office (USCO) granted copyright registration to the digital graphic composition "A Single Piece of American Cheese", a creation produced through a collaboration between the human creativity of Invoke AI’s CEO Kent Keirsey and artificial intelligence (AI), specifically using the "image retouching" or "Inpainting" technology of Invoke AI, Inc. This decision is a real step forward in the legal recognition of AI-assisted creations in the United States.
Unlike the French case, which centered on establishing the date and existence of creative works through blockchain verification, the USCO decision addresses a fundamentally different evidentiary challenge: demonstrating sufficient human creative contribution within AI-assisted generation processes. The ruling establishes that properly documented human creative choices—even when executed through AI tools—can satisfy the originality requirement essential for copyright protection in the US.
The registration was requested by Invoke AI, a company positioned at the forefront of the generative AI sector. Under the leadership of CEO Kent Keirsey—Invoke AI has developed a platform enabling businesses to generate digital content securely from their existing assets. The company has established itself as a significant advocate for creator rights within the evolving AI art ecosystem, championing artists' ability to maintain control over their works and derive economic benefit from them, even as technological mediation of creative processes increases. To generate this work Invoke used an SDXL template AI model called CustomXL to generate three initial images, selecting one of them to work on afterwards. Using a technique called 'inpainting' (selectively regenerating parts of an image while preserving the rest), Invoke iteratively enhanced and modified the chosen image 35 times. This process introduced distinctive elements such as a third eye, melting cheese, upper body and even internal organs, gradually transforming the image into its final surreal and whimsical composition.
Keirsey's active role in the creative process was decisive in his copyright application. Invoke first applied for a copyright for 'A Single Piece of American Cheese' in August 2024 and refused, with the USCO stating that it "lacked the human authorship necessary to support a copyright claim". Invoke then provided further evidence, including a time-lapse video of the creation of the image and an explanation of how Keirsey had been involved in the creation process. The USCO then gave its approval on 30 January 2025. It seems that it was the abundance of evidence of human intervention provided by Invoke that enabled this work to be protected by US copyright. It is the first time that the USCO granted copyright to a work created with a tool enhanced by artificial intelligence.
The "A Single Piece of American Cheese" decision therefore marks a real evolution, by recognising that AI tools can be used as instruments of creation, subject to demonstrable human supervision. It is therefore now recommended that companies methodically organise the collection of evidence throughout the creative process, either by video-recording the stages in the creation process or, more simply, by saving the prompts and outputs, which can be automatically traced and time-stamped by digital tools such as those offered by the blockchain technology.
The parallel developments in French and American jurisprudence suggest a compelling opportunity: the strategic integration of blockchain verification and process documentation into a unified evidentiary framework. This synthesis would provide creators with a comprehensive solution addressing the fundamental requirements common across major intellectual property jurisdictions. By combining these complementary approaches, rights holders could establish both the temporal existence of their works and the nature of human creative contribution.
This integrated approach would involve documenting the entire creative process through video or similar sequential records, then anchoring this documentation within a blockchain system through secure timestamping. The resulting evidence would serve multiple critical functions simultaneously:
This dual-technology approach offers particular value in an increasingly globalized creative economy, where works may require protection across multiple jurisdictions with varying evidentiary standards. The comprehensive nature of blockchain-secured process documentation satisfies both the emphasis on verifiable temporal records and the required demonstrable human creative contribution.
For creators working with emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, this integrated framework provides a practical solution to the unique challenges they face in securing traditional intellectual property protections for innovative forms of creative expression.
2 Court bailiff (Commissaire de justice depuis l’Ordonnance n° 2016-728 du 2 juin 2016 relative au statut de commissaire de justice)
3 Court bailiff (Commissaire de justice depuis l’Ordonnance n° 2016-728 du 2 juin 2016 relative au statut de commissaire de justice)
4 Hangzhou Huatai Media Culture Media Co., Ltd. v. Shenzhen Daotong Technology Development Co., Ltd. (2018) Zhe 0192 No. 81 : It is China’s first case confirming blockchain evidence. The plaintiff, a media company, sued the defendant for copyright infringement after the defendant’s website republished an article without authorization. The plaintiff used a third-party blockchain platform (Baoquan.com) to store evidence webpage screenshots, source code, and invocation logs as evidence of the infringement. The court accepted the blockchain evidence, verifying its authenticity through the third-party platform’s reliability and the data’s immutability. Judges compared the hash of the submitted webpage to the hash on the blockchain ledger and confirmed they matched and corresponded to the correct timestamp. Finding the data intact and the technology reliable, the court admitted the blockchain-certified screenshots as evidence and ruled in favor of the plaintiff.
Lanniuzai Image （Beijing） Co., Ltd. v. China Growth Capital Management (Beijing) Co., Ltd. (2019) Jing 0491 Min Chu No. 724 : A photography copyright case illustrating blockchain verification by the court itself. The plaintiff’s photo (titled “Happy Youngster Playing with Mobile Phones and Computer”) had been used without license in a WeChat blog post. The plaintiff employed a blockchain evidence platform which saved the infringing webpage and generated a hash of the content, issuing a blockchain-based data certificate. The Beijing Internet Court went a step further: it used its own “Balance Chain” judicial blockchain system to simultaneously record the evidence when it was submitted, and then cross-checked the hashes. The hash provided by the plaintiff exactly matched the hash in the court’s blockchain record (and the timestamps were consistent), leading the court to conclude the evidence was authentic and untamperedlexology.com. The blockchain evidence proved key in deciding the case for the photographer (plaintiff)lexology.com. This case underscored the courts’ confidence in blockchain as a means to independently verify digital evidence in real-time.
