Surety, Inc and Firstuse.com Form Alliance Enabling Small Businesses and Consumers to Easily Protect Intellectual Property
Reston, VA, and Westlake Village, CA, June 5, 2000 -- Surety, Inc, the leading provider of digital notarization services, and Firstuse.com, a global online registry that provides confidential, third-party registration of intellectual property and important records, announced today a strategic alliance that will strengthen each company\'s ability to offer data protection services to the retail market.
As a result of the agreement, Surety, Inc has been selected to serve as the trusted timestamp authority for Firstuse.com, digitally notarizing and validating submissions to the Firstuse.com Global Online Registry. Additionally, Firstuse.com becomes the exclusive retail distributor of Digital Notary Services. For the first time, Surety\'s proven timestamping service will now be readily available to small businesses and consumers through Firstuse.com, making it easier for virtually anyone with a computer to protect digital assets and intellectual property the moment a file is created.
\"For the past several years, Digital Notary Service has helped large corporations such as Pfizer and Lucent protect their digital data and intellectual property. We\'re pleased that our irrefutable security service will now be available to the retail marketplace via Firstuse.com. Firstuse.com\'s innovative Online Registry is ideally suited to deliver Digital Notary with value added services to Surety clients,\" said Barry Libenson, Executive Vice President, Sales and Marketing, Surety, Inc.
\"We have always taken a best-of-breed approach to the alliances we form and technologies we use, \" said Craig Honick, Firstuse.com Co-CEO. \"Surety\'s Digital Notary delivers a cryptographically secure timestamp that we are proud to integrate into Firstuse.com\'s service. As a central registry for intellectual property and digital records, we\'re also proud to have been selected by Surety as their exclusive retail VAR.\"
About Digital Notary Service
Digital Notary Service notarizes any digital content by creating a small digital fingerprint of the target data and sending it to Surety, Inc to be registered and timestamped. A unique Digital Notary Record is then sent back to the requesting client for later use in validating the notarization. Individuals, companies and governments using Surety\'s Digital Notary Service can be assured their proprietary data is protected because a digital fingerprint is a one-way identifier-no part of the original data record or file can be reconstructed from its fingerprint.
Offering unprecedented and irrefutable record security, Digital Notary Service protects electronic records in legal settings; reliably dates inventions to establish intellectual property rights; guarantees tamperproof records for regulatory compliance; prevents insider fraud, and; validates the authenticity of electronic records created by e-commerce transactions.
About Firstuse.com\'s Online Registry
Firstuse.com enables individuals and companies worldwide to confidentially register intellectual property and other important digital records, online, with a trusted third party registry. At any time in the future, necessary parties can verify the authenticity of registered files via the Firstuse.com web site. Registrants never have to send a copy of their files to Firstuse.com, nor do they have to divulge the contents of their records. Much like the Digital Notary process, Firstuse.com receives a digital fingerprint of the file. It then simultaneously creates a Firstuse.com Registration record, memorializing the Registration process. Firstuse.com then uses Surety\'s Digital Notary® Service to notarize the registration records, thus time-sealing the registration, and providing greater security to Firstuse.com customers.