Silicon Valley is scraping the internet for free. OneCopy wants to send them the bill.

The global creative economy is bleeding. Between film piracy, software duplication, and illegal ebook sharing, the leakage is measured in the hundreds of billions. But for Robert Leroux, founder of OneCopy, the problem isn’t just theft but the fact that digital ownership is a fundamental myth.

“Every file you’ve ever sent, saved, or shared can be copied by anyone, anywhere, with no record and no consequence,” Leroux tells The Executive Interview. “The internet was developed as a free-for-all. Digital rights simply weren’t part of the architecture.”

Now, as artificial intelligence platforms scrape the collective sum of human output to train their models, Leroux believes the industry has reached a “tipping point.”

While media companies have spent a decade retreating behind paywalls to claw back revenue, Leroux argues that existing protection—from PDFs to Digital Rights Management (DRM)—is essentially a “leaky bucket.”

“PDFs standardise documents, but AI can still scrape them. DRM tries to wrap files in an application-level layer,” Leroux explains. “OneCopy is different because we operate at the kernel level of the operating system.”

By moving the security gate to the OS kernel, OneCopy ensures that ownership is enforced before a single line of code in an application even touches the file. The result? A digital file that is “AI-resistant.” If a creator publishes a “OneCopy file,” a user can read it, but an AI crawler cannot ingest its data.

With a patent filed in September 2025 and a working prototype delivered in January, Leroux is now seeking $10 million in capital to turn his “global standard” vision into a commercial reality.

The roadmap is aggressive:

Leroux is clear on where the money is going. While many tech founders obsess over headcount, Leroux—backed by an agile team of ten—is earmarking 60% to 70% of the raise for client acquisition.

“We are a small team, but our productivity is five to ten times higher because we are using AI to build the very tool that regulates it,” he says.

Beyond stopping the “big tech” scrapers, OneCopy offers a glimpse into a future where digital scarcity is actually enforceable. Leroux points to the creator economy as a primary use case.

“Think of a platform like OnlyFans. Currently, if I send a video, the recipient can share it with the world. With OneCopy, I can restrict that file to exactly five people. Suddenly, the value of that work skyrockets because it cannot be duplicated.”

It is a pitch for a “new internet”—one where the creator, not the platform or the crawler, holds the keys. For the film industry, which lost an estimated $130 billion to piracy in 2024 alone, Leroux’s kernel-level lockbox might be the most important piece of infrastructure they never knew they needed.

“AI was the catalyst that showed us how much we’ve lost,” says Leroux. “Now, it’s the enabler that lets us fix it.”