What a time stamp proves, and what it does not
That sounds like a disappointment. It is not. In almost every dispute an artist actually has, the fight is not about who is capable of drawing the work. It is about the order of events: they say they had it first, or that they found it somewhere with no name on it, or that your version appeared after theirs. A date somebody else vouches for ends that conversation before it starts.
Where authorship actually comes from
Authorship is shown by a chain, not by a single document. The sketches that came before the finished file. The layered original that only the person who made it could have. The day you first published it, and where. The registration, if you filed one. Each link is weak on its own and hard to argue with together.
The time stamp is what pins that chain to the calendar. Without it, every date in the chain is a date you are asserting: file dates can be edited, posts can be backdated, folders can be rearranged. With it, one link in the chain is held by somebody who has no interest in the outcome.
What this looks like in practice
The awkward part is that evidence has to exist before you need it. On the day you find your work on somebody’s product, you cannot go back and create a date. What you can do is send one link that shows the file, its fingerprint, its dates and its stamp, and let the other side’s lawyer read it in a minute rather than a fortnight.
In Legality that link is a certificate, and it is made without you doing anything: every file is fingerprinted and stamped as it arrives. Older dates you know from before — when you drew it, where it first appeared — you enter by hand, and they are kept as your word, marked as such, which is honest and still useful.
It is also why Legality is not self-service: you cannot open an account here by filling in a form. A stamp is a witness to a file, not to a hand, so a platform that let anyone in would be a machine for stamping other people’s work. Every author in Legality is admitted by a person, who reads their request and looks at where their work already lives. That does not make a Legality certificate a verdict on authorship, and we would not claim it does. It means the name on it belongs to somebody we let in on purpose.
A record page for one work: its dates, its fingerprint, its stamp. Nothing here is a mock-up.
Written plainly, and not legal advice. Rules differ by country and change; for a decision that matters, ask a lawyer in the country where the other side is.