IP + Data Time Stamp Co. iDefendo Launches Public API To Increase Uptake

Intellectual property and data verification company, iDefendo, has made public an API that it hopes will allow anyone to make use of its technology.

The Witness API aims to help people create what the company calls ‘Digital Witnesses’ that assist in proving authorship and providing time stamps for any kind of data or process in the legal or other sectors.

This, iDefendo says, will help with ‘protecting IP rights, demonstrate corporate compliance and prove data existence and provenance’.

The system already has integrations with leading legal tech companies such as HighQ, but with this public move it is hoping to greatly widen the range of businesses and law firms that will make use of their system and enable them to connect it to whatever tech stack they are already using.

Founder, Peter Jidesten told Artificial Lawyer (AL): ‘This means that any system that’s connected to the Internet, no matter which language it was built in or what operating system it runs on, can call our API and create ‘Witnesses’ for any data point.’

‘And since it’s all built on cryptographically secure hashes using blockchain, we don’t need to know anything about the underlying data that we witness. That means it can be used even for highly sensitive information,’ he added.

I.e. iDefendo is not looking at the underlying data. It’s just providing a mechanism for creating the time stamps. You could say they are selling you access to a myriad of tiny safes, that only contain a record of your data/documents/images, but which do not hold any ‘content’.

What AL likes about this application is that the blockchain bit is in the background. iDefendo is not shouting ‘Blockchain solves everything!’, it’s just using the tech to solve a specific problem and exploit what is genuinely useful about an immutable digital store of time/data stamps. It’s also not trying to flog you a new type of crypto asset.

The hope is that eventually all blockchain applications will take this approach: simply let the capabilities do the talking. Ah…if only all the applications that make use of these ‘fancy Excel sheets’, as some call them, used the same approach, perhaps blockchain would never have picked up such a bad name?