Frequently Asked Questions

No. ScriptShield is an evidence documentation platform, not a law firm. We provide tools that create timestamped records of your work’s existence and track who has accessed it. These records can be valuable evidence in authorship disputes, but they are not a substitute for legal advice. If you need legal counsel, please consult a qualified attorney in your jurisdiction.

Yes, always. Copyright is automatic the moment you create an original work and fix it in a tangible form. ScriptShield does not claim any ownership of your work. We simply provide documented evidence of when your work existed, which can strengthen your position if authorship is ever questioned.

Hash-only mode creates a unique digital fingerprint of your manuscript entirely within your browser. Your file never leaves your device — only the fingerprint is sent to ScriptShield, and it is mathematically impossible to reconstruct your manuscript from it. This gives you a verified timestamp of your work’s existence with maximum privacy.

Your authorship certificates are downloadable PDF documents that you keep forever — they do not depend on ScriptShield remaining operational. All certificates are cryptographically sealed and carry an independently auditable trusted timestamp issued by a publicly-trusted third party — evidence that can be independently verified by anyone, anywhere, regardless of whether ScriptShield exists.

No. ScriptShield does not compare your work against other works, detect plagiarism, or classify content as "AI" or "not AI". What we do is document your creation timeline — recording when your work existed, what you declared about how it was made, and who had access to it. If someone copies your work, your ScriptShield certificate and distribution log provide the evidence trail showing your work existed first and who received it.

ScriptShield uses a three-tier declaration system. Human: you attest the work was produced without AI assistance. AI-Assisted: AI tools helped with ideation, research, editing, or generation, but you made the creative decisions. AI Creative Work: AI played a substantial or primary role, declared transparently. Each declaration is recorded, timestamped, and tied to your work’s fingerprint. A declaration is evidence of what you stated and when — it is a structured vocabulary for honest disclosure, not a verdict.

No — and you should be wary of any service that claims it does. From 2 August 2026, EU AI Act transparency rules require AI-generated content to be marked and labelled. Those duties sit with AI providers and deployers, not with individual creators, and no certificate automatically satisfies them. What ScriptShield provides is provenance evidence — timestamped records, tamper-evident version history, and AI-use declarations — the kind of cryptographic proof of provenance and authenticity the law itself anticipates. That evidence can support your own disclosure and documentation practices; whether it satisfies any specific obligation is for you and your advisers to determine.

On 15 July 2026, the Australian Government announced a new Office of AI within the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, national AI standards to be legislated, and the "strongest possible protection" for creators’ copyright — rejecting any text-and-data-mining exception and backing creator control over whether and how AI systems use their work. In the Prime Minister’s words: "Anything less is theft." The rules are still being written, but the direction is clear: creators who can document what they made, when, and what they permitted will be in the strongest position. That documentation is exactly what ScriptShield records.

Sentinel is ScriptShield’s continuous-protection service, now in early access. It watches the web for matches to your protected works around the clock, preserves evidence when a match is found, and drafts your response — with every action approved by you before anything is sent, and every step recorded on a tamper-evident provenance log. Matches are reported with a confidence score, never a verdict: whether something is infringement remains a decision for you and your counsel. Plans scale by works watched and media covered, from $399/month.

ScriptShield supports PDF, DOCX, TXT, FDX (Final Draft), and Fountain file formats. This covers the vast majority of screenwriting, novel writing, songwriting, and general creative writing workflows. The maximum file size is 50 MB.

Yes. All uploaded manuscripts are encrypted at rest on secure servers. Your files are never shared with third parties. Only you (and recipients you explicitly share with via distribution links) can access your work. In hash-only mode, your file never even reaches our servers.

Every certified work is sealed with a unique cryptographic fingerprint. Even a single character change in your manuscript produces a completely different fingerprint, which means it proves the exact content existed at the time it was registered — and no one can reconstruct your manuscript from it. Full technical detail is available to customers and legal counsel on request.