Yup, you're correct that an official registration with the Copyright Office is required to successfully sue for infringement but what changed with the Copyright

Yup, you're correct that an official registration with the Copyright Office is required to successfully sue for infringement but what changed with the Copyright Act of 1976 is that registration can happen after the fact, even if you've been denied, in which case you'll definitely need some evidence of ownership or some other proof of publication. Until there is more statutory law or common law precedent set around even the fundamental notion of using digital signatures to as a proof of authorship all of this is really sort of up in the air but we're trying our best to work within the existing legal structures in the jurisdictions where we're doing business The bigger picture with Open Publish is to create a software platform for digital ownership that allows for say, a Patreon-like application to seamlessly integrate with a Spotify-like application, if that makes any sense! Our first attempt at a product built with Open Publish is just a simple proof of publication service that people can use along with existing legal notions of copyright with the hope that we can start registering content before we worry about solving the problems of a two-sided marketplace!