Prove a Pitch Predates a Knockoff

An agency pitches. The prospect declines. Months later something recognisable turns up in the prospect's marketing, or from a competitor who was in the same room.

This is one of the oldest complaints in creative work, and it is almost always a problem of evidence rather than of law.

What you are actually trying to establish

Three separate things, and conflating them is why these disputes go badly.

That the work existed on a date. The narrow, provable fact.

That they had access to it. Usually easy — you sent it, and there is an email.

That what they produced derives from yours rather than arriving independently. This is the hard one, and no record can settle it for you.

A timestamp addresses the first completely and contributes nothing directly to the third. That is a limited contribution, and it is the one most often missing.

Why your existing records are weaker than they feel

The pitch deck on your server has a modification date your own machine wrote. See why metadata is not proof of a date.

The email you sent is better — the headers are the provider's, not yours. It also requires the account to still exist, the thread to be producible cleanly, and it proves what you sent rather than what you had beforehand.

Your project management tool is a company's database, editable by administrators and subject to retention policies.

The working files are genuinely useful. Layered originals, intermediate versions and the working process are strong, because a copyist has the output and nothing behind it. Their dates are still yours to write.

The pattern: what you have proves possession and access reasonably well, and the date badly.

What to do before the next pitch

Timestamp the deck before you send it. Two minutes, a few dollars, and it converts your weakest evidence into your strongest.

Specifically:

1. The concept work when it is finished internally — before anyone external sees it.
2. The exact deck you are about to send.
3. Rejected routes. These are the ones most likely to reappear, and the ones least likely to exist anywhere else.
4. Working files, not just the flattened output. The process is the part a copyist cannot reproduce.

The file is hashed in your browser and only the hash is transmitted, so an NDA is not an obstacle — nothing is uploaded and there is nothing to disclose in a client security review.

What it changes when a dispute arrives

Before: you assert the work is yours, produce files with dates you control, and the other side observes that you could have created them at any time.

After: you produce a record fixed in a public ledger, created before their product existed, that neither party can alter. The date stops being arguable, and the argument moves to the question that should actually be decided — whether their work derives from yours.

That is a better position and not a complete one. Access and derivation still have to be established the ordinary way: the email trail, the similarities, the sequence of events.

What no record can do

It cannot prove they copied. Independent creation is a real phenomenon, especially within one brief and one market, and courts take it seriously.

It cannot prove you originated the concept. A timestamp shows you held a file; see proof of existence vs proof of authorship.

It cannot make an unprotectable idea protectable. If what was taken is the concept rather than the expression, copyright has nothing to offer — see trademark vs copyright for an idea.

The contract point

Worth saying alongside all of this: a contract with the prospect is the stronger instrument where you can get one. An NDA or a paid pitch fee creates an obligation that does not depend on proving derivation at all.

You often cannot get one — prospects decline NDAs routinely. The record is what you do when the contract is unavailable, and it costs almost nothing. See blockchain timestamping for design agencies.