Introducing Etcht Neo
Etcht Neo is live: an invisible mark that proves your work is yours and survives what the internet does to it.
You post a drawing. A week later it’s on someone else’s account with the credit gone, and you can’t prove the work started with you. The people who’d happily credit you can’t find you either - they drop an ‘artist?’ under the repost and get ignored.
Etcht Neo is my answer to that, and it’s live today. Neo is the first official version of the mark - it replaces the Imprint 1 pre-release.
Neo writes an invisible mark into the pixels of your image, with nothing visible slapped over your art. The marked copy looks identical to the original, and anyone who checks it can see the work is yours.
It ships with a certain social platform we’ve been working on. Post an image there and it’s protected - there’s nothing to set up and nothing to learn. Images first; video, text and more later.
What it survives
Post to mainstream social media and the mark holds. Recompression, resizing and metadata stripping are what Neo is built and measured against. It covers the whole frame, so a crop still carries it, and it survives partial damage - an edit, or someone drawing over part of it.
If an edit does destroy the mark, the registry can still match the image by how it looks. And if a copy is wrecked beyond recognition, the mark dies with it. That’s deliberate - Neo protects your work for as long as a copy is still recognisable as your work.
How it works
Marking an image registers it, and the first-seen date is permanent. Anyone who checks a copy can see it traces back to you, and when it first appeared.
No crawling
Etcht never scans the web for your images. Sightings come from people who installed the extension and chose to take part. Etcht is hosted in the EU and GDPR compliant.
For organisations
The same marking and checking runs as an API: mark images at upload, verify copies with one call, and get back who registered the original and what the copy has survived. Attach your own metadata to each mark - internal key-values that link a mark to a user or record in your own system.
Etcht works as a network. Join the shared one and your marks resolve across every other organisation in it, and you can resolve theirs. Or run your own private network, where you decide who’s a member and what a match reveals. An organisation can belong to several at once.
Access is invite-only for organisations - request it at etcht.dev.
The benchmarks and a full technical write-up land in July.