About CerboTrace

Status

CerboTrace is in development and not yet open. This page describes the product being built and the principles behind it. Details may change before launch — join the waitlist and we will tell you when it opens.

Who is building this

If you sell digital cut files, you have probably already had the evening: you go looking, and you find your own design in a shop that is not yours. Same curves, new mockup, two dollars cheaper, a few hundred sales. You screenshot it. You look up how DMCA notices work. You lose a night to it, and next month you do it again with a different design.

CerboTrace is built by a working seller of digital cut files, which is the entire reason it exists. Every service that already does IP enforcement was built for photographers — their matching is photo matching, their crawl targets are blogs, and their business model assumes a settlement cheque that never arrives when a $4 SVG gets copied. A design re-exported through Cricut Design Space and dropped onto someone else's product photo is invisible to all of them.

It is a deliberately small operation, which means nobody here needs convincing that a $4 SVG is worth protecting.

The approach

Most services in this space lead with watermarking. We deliberately don't, because a watermark is the weakest link in the chain: any re-export can destroy it. The design here inverts that.

The registry is the evidence

When a work is registered we compute fingerprints and embeddings, sign them, and anchor them with an independent RFC 3161 timestamp. What that produces is a priority record — this account registered this fingerprint on this date — which is what a platform IP form or a small-claims filing actually uses. It is not a finding of ownership, and we will not describe it as one.

The watermark is a tracer, not a lock

Watermarking is offered as an additional channel with its scope stated plainly: it is built to survive casual redistribution, and a determined person with the right tools can defeat it. A protection tool must also never damage the thing it protects, so the acceptance bar is that a watermarked SVG renders pixel-identical at 300 DPI and cuts identically.

Detection has to survive the real pipeline

The artifact a thief actually produces is rarely your clean file. It is your design composited onto their product photo at an angle, or one cell in a 50-design bundle grid, or a trace-back-to-SVG round-trip through Inkscape. Detection is measured against exactly those transformations, including import/export through LightBurn and Cricut Design Space. The resulting recall and false-positive figures are published per transformation class, so accuracy is something you can check rather than something we assert.

How candidates are found

Through paid reverse-image search APIs and official platform APIs — buying access rather than engineering around it. Our acquisition red lines, published as policy: no residential proxies, no user-agent spoofing, no multi-key quota evasion, and no collecting from surfaces that have said no. Every grey tactic has a legitimate alternative that merely costs money.

What we will keep, and what we won't

A service whose output is evidence has to retain evidence, so "we store nothing" would be an easy claim to make and a false one. The policy, stated precisely:

• Your original files are deleted after processing. We do not keep a library of your unwatermarked designs.
• Fingerprints, embeddings and normalised renders are retained. These are what a match is computed against. A render is a low-resolution derivative used for comparison, not a distributable copy of your product.
• Evidence captures are retained, deliberately and immutably. Screenshots and archived copies of infringing listings are stored write-once, because a dispute that surfaces two years later has to find the evidence bit-identical. This is the point of the product.
• Minimal personal data. Account details and the marketplace listing URLs we check. No buyer data.
• Encrypted in transit. Standard, and worth stating without dressing it up as a differentiator.

Data export and deletion are available, honouring the retention policy above, with a published list of subprocessors. If retaining renders and evidence is not acceptable to you, better to know that now than after you have signed up.

Our Mission

We believe that creators deserve to be protected and compensated for their work. Our mission is to level the playing field by giving independent creators and small businesses the same level of protection that was once only available to large corporations.

By making advanced watermarking and tracing technology accessible and affordable, we aim to create a digital marketplace where theft is no longer profitable or easy, and where creators can focus on what they do best – creating amazing work.

The rules we hold ourselves to

Commitments, not caveats — each one is a decision about how this gets built:

• You stay in control of every notice. Takedowns go out under your name, reviewed by you, never auto-filed. Filing on a detection system's output is how a company lands on the wrong side of 17 U.S.C. § 512(f), and how a creator inherits a liability they never agreed to.
• Watermark claims stay honest. Anyone selling you an unremovable watermark is describing marketing, not engineering. Ours survives casual redistribution, and the registry is what carries the weight.
• You decide what a match means. We surface the evidence and grade our confidence in it. Disputes get settled between the parties and the platform — we are not an adjudicator and will not pretend to be one.
• Access is bought, not stolen. Paid reverse-image APIs and official platform APIs only. No residential proxies, no user-agent spoofing, no multi-key quota evasion, no collecting from surfaces that have said no.
• Match scores stay private to you. A score visible to anyone else is a tuning signal for perturbing a design until it stops matching.
• Every number arrives with its benchmark. If we quote a figure, you get the test that produced it.

Contact Us

Have questions about CerboTrace or need assistance? We're here to help: