The Digital Millennium Copyright Act is, for all its reputation, a remarkably good statute. Section 512(c)(3) gives an independent creator the same standing as a major studio. A well-formed notice, sent to the right address, gets a listing removed within seventy-two hours in most cases. The marketplaces, when they receive a clean notice, mostly comply. The system works.
The system works if you can write the notice. And finding the address. And cropping the screenshots. And keeping the audit trail. And, when the listing comes back two weeks later under a new seller name, doing it again. And again.
What we built
Cult Shield is the legal team you do not employ. It watches, documents, drafts, and files, and it returns the hours you were spending on the second shift to the first one. The product is opinionated in three ways:
1. Evidence, not screenshots.
Every original is hashed the moment you upload. Two independent timestamp authorities sign the digest. A copy is anchored to the Bitcoin chain. When a dispute lands, your evidence reads like a courtroom exhibit, not a screenshot. The audit log is append-only and hashed daily. The work to make a notice unimpeachable is done before you ever need it.
2. Human approval before every notice leaves the building.
The DMCA imposes personal perjury liability on the signer of a notice. We refuse to outsource that decision to a model. Every notice you file with Cult Shield is approved by you, in plain English, on a single screen that shows the original, the suspect listing, the match score, and the proposed text. You can change a word. You can cancel. You can mark a match as authorized re-use. The model drafts; you sign.
3. Per model, not per URL.
The legacy industry charges per takedown. DMCA.com asks $199 for a single URL. Pixsy takes 50% of any recovery. We think this pricing is exactly upside-down: the work is in the original you uploaded, not in the URL we find. So Cult Shield is priced per model you monitor. If your "Aegis Helmet v2" is ripped on six marketplaces in a month, that is six filings, one case, one price.
What we are not
We are not a law firm. We do not give legal advice. We do not file lawsuits. We do not pursue criminal copyright infringement. When a case escalates beyond what a takedown notice can do, we hand off cleanly to a real attorney in your jurisdiction. We are also not a content moderation platform; we will not file notices against fair-use, parody, or transformative work that fails our pre-classification gate.
We are also, for now, only for STL and 3D-model creators. Photographers, video makers, musicians, software authors, we see you. Cult Shield is designed to extend, and we will, in this order: photographers in early 2027, short-form video in late 2027, music in 2028, indie software the same year. But every vertical takes a year to do honestly, and we are doing STL first because that is where the founder lives, where the pain is loudest, and where the wedge wins.
Why now
Two reasons. The first is that mesh-geometry hashing has become reliable enough on commodity hardware to fingerprint a 3D model the way a hash fingerprints a photograph. The second is that AI now writes a passable first draft of a DMCA notice in eight seconds. Either of these alone would not have justified Cult Shield. Together, they collapse the cost of a takedown by an order of magnitude, and an unpaid second shift becomes a one-click approval.
This is what we want for you: you spot a rip on a Tuesday. The notice is drafted by the time you finish your coffee. You read it, change two words, click approve, close the tab. The version of you that should be modelling goes back to modelling. We will handle the rest.
Ondrej · founder · Bratislava · 26 May 2026