June 12, 2025 marked a turning point for content creators worldwide. CapCut quietly updated its Terms of Service, granting itself sweeping rights over user content that many creators haven’t fully grasped yet. While you might be checking the latest solana price in INR or planning your next viral video, there’s a more pressing concern lurking in those terms you probably clicked “agree” on without reading.

According to Claudia Sandino, Director at Omnivore, these new terms give CapCut “broad rights over your content, including the ability to use it however they want, alter it, and profit from it – all indefinitely”. This includes your voice, face, likeness, creative edits, and branded content. The platform can now modify, publish, monetize, and resell your work without notifying or paying you. What’s particularly concerning? This applies to public and private videos, even drafts that never see the light of day.

The timing couldn’t be worse. Online video piracy alone causes $75 billion in losses annually, growing at 11% per year. For individual creators, this corporate land grab represents a new frontier of content vulnerability that traditional copyright law wasn’t designed to handle.

Here’s where blockchain technology enters the conversation—not as some futuristic solution, but as a practical tool that’s already protecting millions of digital works. According to research published in PLOS ONE, blockchain-based video copyright management can provide cryptographic proof of ownership through immutable timestamping. The technology creates permanent records that cannot be altered, giving creators irrefutable evidence of original authorship.

The $71 Billion Problem That Just Got Personal

The broader content protection crisis affects everyone. The US TV and film industry loses an estimated $71 billion annually to piracy and unauthorized distribution. But CapCut’s terms make this macro problem deeply personal for individual creators.

Think about it this way: you spend hours perfecting your CapCut editing techniques, crafting the perfect transition, color-grading your footage, and syncing everything to music. Under the new terms, CapCut can take that polished content and use it in advertisements, training materials, or sell it to third parties—forever, globally, without compensation.

The license is perpetual, sublicensable, and irrevocable. Even if you deleted your account tomorrow, CapCut still has these rights in perpetuity. You have also waived your moral rights, which means they can change your work, which may also distort or misrepresent your work.

Blockchain provides an alternate solution. By registering your content before it goes anywhere else, you will have cryptographic proof of ownership that is not dependent on any service agreement on the platform. As previously stated, research has indicated that Blockchain is capable of storing watermark information while also providing timestamp proof of information to create an unbreakable chain of evidence in the potential dispute concerning the copyright.

Blockchain Creates Unbreakable Ownership Records

Blockchain technology creates your creative works in digital ledgers through recorded as cryptographic hashes linking metadata, equivalent to making a unique digital fingerprint of your content that which is mathematically impossible to forge or alter.

Recent innovations in blockchain-based copyright management which employ digital watermarking with perceptual hash functions for video content is helpful. You can put watermark information directly in the videos while recording the verification information on the blockchain, meaning an unbreakable link will exists between the content you created and yourself.

Smart contracts also encapsulate more protections. These contracts are self-executing and can automatically accommodate licensing agreements and royalty payments, which gives creators the opportunity to sell their work directly, without intermediaries, to their customers. Furthermore, smart contracts would have the ability to track every usage of your registered content, which will enable real-time surveillance of how your work is distributed on different platforms.

Smart contracts add another layer of protection. These self-executing contracts can automatically handle licensing agreements and royalty payments, enabling creators to sell their work directly to consumers without intermediaries. More importantly, they can track every usage of your registered content, providing real-time monitoring of how your work is being distributed across platforms.

The approach addresses a key vulnerability that CapCut’s terms exploit: the assumption that creators have no independent proof of ownership once they upload content to a platform. Blockchain flips this dynamic by establishing ownership records before content enters any editing ecosystem.

Consider this scenario: you create a video, register it on blockchain, then edit it using CapCut. Even if CapCut claims broad rights over the edited version, you maintain cryptographic proof of ownership over the original concept, footage, and creative elements. This creates a legal foundation that exists entirely outside of CapCut’s jurisdiction.

Building Your Creator Protection Fortress

Several platforms already process millions of blockchain-based digital registrations, proving this isn’t theoretical technology. Services like Binded and Ascribe have modernized intellectual property administration through blockchain networks, while projects like Mediachain Lab and Fluree specifically deploy timestamping functions for video creators.

The key is implementing protection before your content touches any editing platform. Here’s the practical workflow: shoot your footage, register it on a blockchain platform, edit using whatever tools you prefer (including high-quality CapCut techniques), then register the final edited version as a derivative work.

This approach creates multiple layers of ownership proof:

• Original footage timestamped and registered
• Creative editing choices documented through blockchain records
• Final work registered as a new creation building on your original materials
• Smart contracts governing usage rights and licensing terms

The technology also enables enhanced distribution tracking. Every time someone uses your registered content, it’s recorded on the blockchain, creating transparent consumption-based pricing mechanisms. This visibility helps creators monitor unauthorized usage and assert their rights when necessary.

What’s particularly valuable is blockchain’s resistance to platform policy changes. While CapCut can alter its terms overnight, blockchain records remain immutable and accessible regardless of any single platform’s decisions.

The Creator’s New Reality Check

CapCut’s policy shift signals a broader transformation in how platforms view creator relationships. We’re moving from partnerships toward extraction models where platforms claim increasingly broad rights over user-generated content.

The traditional response—reading terms of service more carefully, seeking legal advice, or avoiding certain platforms—misses the fundamental power imbalance. Individual creators can’t negotiate with billion-dollar platforms. They need technological solutions that level the playing field.

Blockchain provides exactly that: a way to establish and maintain ownership rights that exist independently of any platform’s terms. As more creators adopt these protection strategies, we might see platforms reconsider their approach to user content rights.

The question isn’t whether blockchain will become standard practice for content creators—it’s whether you’ll implement these protections before or after experiencing your first major content rights dispute. Given the current trajectory of platform policies, that decision feels less optional with each passing month.

Your creative work deserves protection that doesn’t depend on corporate goodwill or platform policies. Blockchain offers that protection today, not someday in the future.