Firm's Digital Fingerprint Guards Documents.

You're in a band with your high school buddies and you've just written a song that you're convinced has platinum potential. You record the song into MP3 and soon thousands are downloading it. Fantasies of a nationwide concert tour and hordes of screaming fans fill your head.

But then you hear your song on the car radio, sung by some band you've never heard of.

How do you prove you had it first? The people at Westlake Village-based Firstuse.com believe they have the answer.

The company that bills itself as the first Internet registry of intellectual property gives digital files a time stamp and a unique fingerprint that appears to be holding up in court, all without requiring the user to divulge the file's contents.

"We built on a variety of technologies so that anyone with Internet access can instantly register their work," said CEO Cliff Michaels. "The technology is not new, it just wasn't accessible before."

The company can stamp a date on any kind of computer file, no matter what size or format -- including video files, photos, graphic designs, documents, tax forms, music files and even Web pages.

After opening an account, a user clicks on a file to register. Firstuse sends over a program that scans the file's binary code. That generates a unique "fingerprint" (a string of numbers) that is sent back to Firstuse and stored. If the registered file is altered in any way, the original fingerprint will not match up to the file.

In the coming months, new software will be added that allows users to keep an archived copy of the registered file in a read-only format -- allowing users to update files, such as a screenplay, while keeping the original file intact. The fingerprint is stored for 10 years and can be renewed.

With intellectual property becoming one of the hot issues online, the legal community is paying attention.

A Chicago court reporting firm, Victoria Court Reporting, signed on in September to register documents or depositions for clients, so it can validate that the document hasn't been altered before going to court.

"They're really a force to be reckoned with," said Cliff Numark, director of the Los Angeles Regional Technology Alliance. "Intellectual property disputes occur all the time. What their system enables people to do is say, 'I got there first.'

Firstuse isn't alone in its field, but Michaels said the company offers both a time stamp and file fingerprint, whereas most competitors offer either one or the other.

The idea for the registry came after Michaels and Craig Honick, who had owned a Web-site development business, were hired to design a Web site for an attorney who asked how they were protecting it from copyright infringement. The two found that the technology to protect the pages was there, just not in an easy-to-use format.

"Once things are digital, they lack credibility," Michaels said. "After we began talking to experts about electronic verification, we realized there was no universal standard that established when something was created."