HOW MINDINVENTORY MODERNISED CEARTAS'S AI-POWERED CONTENT PROTECTION PLATFORM
MindInventory partnered with Ceartas, a Dublin-based content protection company, to modernize the AI detection and takedown platform that scans roughly 75 million sites and 2,000+ platforms around the clock for stolen content, deepfakes, and impersonation, then removes it.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Modernized an existing production platform incrementally, no rebuild, no disruption to live monitoring
$6M+ in stolen content removed in 10 weeks, 600,000+ unauthorized images and videos removed
AI-assisted detection (face detection, media analysis, lip-sync verification, forgery detection) with human review retained for every enforcement decision
Platform holds official status in Google's Trusted Copyright Removal Program and partners directly with OnlyFans, TikTok, Meta, and Cloudflare
AT A GLANCE
Dan Purcell, CEO & Co-Founder
Jonathan Smyth, CTO & Co-Founder
WORTH OF STOLEN CONTENT REMOVED IN 10 WEEKS
IMAGES AND VIDEOS REMOVED
CREATORS, AGENCIES, AND BRANDS PROTECTED
WHY THIS HAD TO BE BUILT
Ceartas exists because of a gap its founder experienced directly. Dan Purcell started the company after discovering that intimate content of himself had been shared online without his consent, and finding that almost nothing available at the time was built to help an individual, only large enterprises with legal teams.
That gap is structural, not just personal. Ireland's Coco's Law, passed in 2020, criminalized the non-consensual sharing of intimate images, but the removal process for victims remained slow and manual.
At the same time, Ireland has one of the highest concentrations of creator-economy activity in Europe and hosts major platform headquarters, meaning both the volume of content at risk and the infrastructure to fight back at scale exist in the same place.
Notice-and-takedown law across Ireland and the EU still relies on rights-holders filing individual notices rather than automatic filtering, so speed and volume have to come from automation, not from the law itself.
THE CHALLENGE
A CONSTANTLY SHIFTING DETECTION SURFACE
Platforms and search engines continually change indexing, security, and anti-bot mechanisms, requiring the monitoring system to adapt without disrupting active detection
THREE VERY DIFFERENT USER TYPES, ONE PLATFORM
Creators, agencies, and enterprise customers each needed a different operational experience without duplicating the underlying business logic
DISTRIBUTED SYSTEM COORDINATION
Creator portals, dashboards, a browser extension, backend services, AI workflows, and monitoring infrastructure all had to stay synchronized and responsive
AI INTRODUCED WITHOUT SLOWING ENFORCEMENT
Face detection, media analysis, and forgery detection needed to run inside existing workflows without compromising processing speed or accuracy
HOW DETECTIONBECOMES A TAKEDOWN
MAP
Ceartas builds a picture of a creator's footprint from a username or handle, no original content upload required in most cases.
SCAN
AI-powered scanners crawl roughly 75 million sites and 2,000+ platforms continuously, including social media, piracy sites, forums, torrents, file hosts, and, on higher plans, Telegram and Discord.
DETECT AND VERIFY
Lightweight AI models flag likely matches, leaks, deepfakes, impersonator accounts, watermark misuse, and route them for verification, including lip-sync and forgery checks on suspected synthetic media.
HUMAN REVIEW
A specialist reviews flagged content before enforcement action is filed, the AI narrows the search space; a person still makes the call.
ENFORCE
The platform issues takedowns using DMCA and six additional legal frameworks, backed by direct relationships with platforms including Google, OnlyFans, TikTok, Meta, and Cloudflare, and files delisting requests with search engines when content can't be removed at the source.
TRACK
Every action is visible on a real-time dashboard, so a creator or agency can see exactly what was found and what happened to it.
ENGINEERING DECISIONS WORTHKNOWING ABOUT
A few technical choices are why this platform holds up at the scale it operates at.
Modernizing in place, not rebuilding. Ceartas's platform was already live and protecting real creators when MindInventory joined. A full rebuild would have meant downtime on active monitoring, unacceptable for a system where a delay in detection is a delay in getting someone's stolen content down. The engineering approach was incremental: strengthen detection, automate reporting, and optimize the database layer around a platform that never stopped running.
Celery and RQ for task distribution. Scanning 75 million sites isn't one job, it's an enormous number of small, independent scanning and verification jobs running continuously. Distributing that work through task queues instead of a single monolithic scanning process is what lets the system keep pace as the platforms and sites it scans keep changing their own defenses.
Scrapers built to be retuned, not rebuilt, when a site changes. Anti-bot mechanisms and page structures shift constantly across thousands of monitored sources. Building the scraping layer as a set of independently adjustable components, rather than one rigid crawler, meant a single site changing its defenses didn't require touching the rest of the monitoring pipeline.
A Chrome extension for evidence capture at the point of discovery. One-click reporting and screenshot capture feeding directly into the pipeline removes a real bottleneck: evidence gathered by a human in the moment they spot something is more reliable than evidence reconstructed later.
BUILT FOR TRUST, NOT JUST SPEED
AI narrows down millions of possible matches into a manageable review queue, but every enforcement decision, every takedown notice, every legal filing, still passes through a human before it's filed. That's not a limitation of the AI, it's the design: Ceartas's account managers are WIPO-certified, and the platform maintains audit trails and secure handling practices appropriate for a system that regularly deals with sensitive personal content, including cases involving non-consensual intimate imagery, which Ceartas continues to support at no cost to victims.
That trust shows up in independent, checkable ways: Ceartas holds official status in Google's Trusted Copyright Removal Program, is the official safety partner of OnlyFans, and has direct partnerships with TikTok, Meta, and Cloudflare, relationships that only exist because those platforms have vetted Ceartas's process, not just its marketing claims.
THE RESULTS
in stolen content removed in 10 weeks
The scaled detection and enforcement pipeline turned into recovered value quickly, not just theoretically
images and videos removed
Automated monitoring and reporting operating at genuine volume, not a pilot-scale number
creators, agencies, and brands protected
The platform scaled from an individual-focused tool into enterprise-grade protection without losing its original mission
seed funding raised
Growing platform capability and market traction supported by the engineering work contributed to securing funding for continued expansion
MANUAL DMCA FILING VS. CEARTAS
DISCOVERY
ENFORCEMENT
VERIFICATION
RECOGNIZED BEYOND ITS OWN MARKETING
Ceartas's growth has been covered independently, not just claimed. TechCrunch and Silicon Republic both reported on the company's $4.5M seed round and its origin story. YouTube group The Sidemen co-led that round through their Upside VC fund after becoming a customer first, Ceartas reduced IP threats against the group's Side+ platform by more than 43% in six months.
IN THEIR WORDS
Dan Purcell, founder and CEO of Ceartas, described the platform's mission plainly to Silicon Republic: it exists to protect anyone with a digital presence “from manipulation, be it via stolen content or artificially generated content such as deepfakes.”
WHAT'S NEXT FORCEARTAS'S PLATFORM
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
WHAT DID MINDINVENTORY BUILD FOR CEARTAS?
MindInventory has been working with Ceartas since 2024 as a dedicated engineering team, modernizing their content protection platform. We strengthened the AI detection side — face detection, media analysis, forgery detection — automated the reporting and takedown workflows, built a Chrome extension that captures evidence in one click, and reworked the dashboards and database layer so the platform could handle a much heavier scan load without slowing down.
WHAT RESULTS DID THE MODERNIZATION DELIVER?
In one 10-week stretch after the scaled pipeline went live, Ceartas removed over $6M worth of stolen content — 600,000+ images and videos taken down. The platform now protects 4,000+ creators, agencies and brands, having grown from a tool built for individual creators into something agencies and enterprise clients run on. Ceartas closed a $4.5M seed round during the same period.
HOW DO YOU BUILD A PLATFORM THAT FINDS AND REMOVES STOLEN CONTENT?
Four layers have to work together. A crawler that covers the sources where content actually leaks. A detection layer that can recognise a face, a watermark, or a re-uploaded clip and tell real from synthetic. An enforcement layer that turns a match into a valid removal request and files it. And a dashboard where human specialists review the cases the machine isn't confident about. Ceartas had all four when we came in. Our job was to make each one faster and more accurate.
WHAT TECHNOLOGY GOES INTO AI PIRACY DETECTION?
On Ceartas, detection runs on Python — computer vision for likeness and face matching, classifiers for synthetic and manipulated media, and custom scrapers built per source rather than one generic crawler, because the sites where content leaks all behave differently. Celery and RQ handle the job queues so scanning and filing run continuously in the background. The front end is React.js on a Node.js and Meteor.js backend.
HOW LONG DOES A BUILD LIKE THIS TAKE?
Ceartas wasn't a from-scratch build. We joined in 2024 on a platform already live with paying creators, which changes the shape of the work — you ship in phases against production traffic instead of releasing one big version, and the engagement stays open rather than ending at handover. A ground-up MVP with crawling, detection and automated filing is a different question, and usually a shorter one, but nothing in this category is finished at launch. Piracy sources keep changing, so detection has to change with them.
DOES THE AI REPLACE HUMAN REVIEWERS?
No, and it shouldn't. AI does the volume work: scanning, matching, flagging. People make the calls that need judgement — which platform to approach, which legal route actually works, when something is a borderline match. Ceartas has WIPO-certified account managers doing exactly that. The system routes confident matches straight to automation and pushes the rest to a person.
WHY BUILD A CHROME EXTENSION FOR TAKEDOWNS?
Because evidence capture was the slowest manual step. Before, someone had to find the infringing page, screenshot it, copy the URL, note the timestamp, then switch tabs and paste all of it into a case file. The extension does that in one click and sends it straight into the workflow. Small feature, but it removed a lot of daily friction and produced cleaner evidence for legal escalation.
WHAT'S CEARTAS'S RELATIONSHIP WITH THE BIG PLATFORMS?
Ceartas holds official status in Google's Trusted Copyright Removal Program, is the official safety partner of OnlyFans, and has direct partnerships with TikTok, Meta and Cloudflare — which is why their removals move faster than a cold DMCA notice would. They also enforce under six-plus legal frameworks rather than DMCA alone, which matters when the host sits offshore and has no reason to answer a US notice.
IS CEARTAS ONLY FOR ADULT CREATORS?
No. YouTubers dealing with re-uploaded videos, musicians, coaches whose paid courses end up in Telegram groups, influencers being cloned by fake accounts, public figures targeted by deepfakes. Anyone whose face or paid content can be stolen has the same problem, just on a different platform.
CAN MINDINVENTORY BUILD SOMETHING SIMILAR FOR US?
Yes. We work as an engineering partner on trust and safety products: content moderation systems, deepfake and impersonation detection, takedown automation, brand protection platforms. Ceartas started as dedicated hiring — a team embedded with their engineering rather than a fixed-scope handover — and has run since 2024, covering both new AI features and modernization of a platform already protecting 4,000+ creators, agencies and brands. We're comfortable either starting from zero or coming into an existing codebase.
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