Limitations: What a Registration Does Not Do

The Suede IP Registry organizes and prepares records. It takes facts and declarations you bring to it — a file, a claim, a contributor list — and files them in a form that is timestamped, signed, public, and independently checkable. It does not create rights, confirm claims, or produce legal effects. Every limitation below follows from that principle.

• Not government copyright registration. A Suede record is not a filing with the U.S. Copyright Office or any national IP office. In the United States, timely USCO registration is a prerequisite for filing an infringement suit and for statutory damages and attorney’s fees. A Suede record confers none of that. If those protections matter to you, register with the USCO (or your local equivalent) as well — the two are complementary, not substitutes.
• No legal protection is created. Registration does not protect a work from copying, scraping, sampling, or AI training. It creates a record you can point to afterward; it is not a shield.
• No rights are created or transferred. Copyright arises when a work is fixed, under the law of the relevant jurisdiction. Filing a record neither grants you rights you lacked nor moves rights between people. Transfers and exclusive licenses generally require signed writings under laws like 17 U.S.C. § 204 — a registry entry is not that writing.
• No guarantee of legal outcomes. Courts, arbitrators, platforms, and counterparties decide for themselves what weight to give a registry record. It may be persuasive evidence. It may be given no weight at all. Suede makes no promise either way.
• Not legal advice. Nothing in the product or its documentation is legal advice. For decisions with legal consequences, consult a qualified attorney.

• Claims are recorded, not vetted. The registry verifies the wallet signature and the file hash. It does not investigate whether the registrant wrote the song, owns the master, cleared the samples, or had co-writer consent. A fraudulent claim, filed correctly, produces a well-formed record of a fraudulent claim.
• Ownership is not confirmed. A record showing wallet X claimed work Y is not a finding that X owns Y. Treat it as one input among several — alongside contracts, credits, and the wallet’s public association with the artist.
• Conflicts are displayed, not resolved. Two people can register conflicting claims about the same work. The registry shows both, with timestamps. Sorting out who is right happens off-chain, between the parties or in court.
• Splits are declarations, not settlements. The contributor record does not pay anyone, bind anyone, or override any contract. Royalty routing built on these declarations is a separate, future concern; today the declaration is evidence of what was stated, nothing more.

• The record is only as precise as the file. The fingerprint covers one exact file. Remasters, re-exports, alternate mixes, and format conversions are different files with different hashes. Registering the wrong version gives you a precise record of the wrong thing.
• The timestamp is a latest-possible bound. It proves the claim existed by that time, not that the work was created then. A work registered late is provable only from the late date.
• Wallet loss is claim-control loss. The record itself persists on-chain, but if you lose access to the registering wallet you lose the ability to sign further actions (updates, authorizations, future licensing) as the original claimant.
• Public means public, permanently. On-chain records and files hosted on public IPFS are effectively impossible to retract. Do not register confidential agreements, unreleased material you are not prepared to have public, or personal information. See Preparing Your Work.
• Licensing is currently paused. License issuance and verification are offline during the owner-authorization upgrade. No template, editor setting, or marketplace button should be treated as a granted license until the product confirms a signed grant and a successful verification result. Status lives at Licensing.

Given all of the above — a fair question. The answer: a registration is organized, dated, signed, independently checkable evidence, created before you needed it. In split disagreements, takedown disputes, licensing negotiations, and provenance questions in the AI era, the party with a precise record generally does better than the party with a shoebox of undated files. That is the value. It is real, and it is bounded — and now you know exactly where the boundary is.