Tomas Cruz-Melendez is a science fiction author and technology entrepreneur from Virginia. He published nine science fiction novels in 2025—stories he had been carrying since 1997—and used AI-generated cover art created through Midjourney. When he submitted all nine books to the U.S. Copyright Office under identical disclosure, two were rejected and seven were approved, with no standardized explanation for the difference. That experience sent him down a research path that revealed a far deeper problem: there is no infrastructure connecting content creators to the AI companies training on their work, no system for fair compensation, and no reliable way to verify what is authentic and what is fabricated.
Drawing on 35 years of telecommunications and systems architecture experience at AT&T, Verizon, Avaya, and CACI International, Tomas founded Rights Clearing House (RCH) to build that missing infrastructure. RCH is developing a universal platform for intellectual property verification, attribution, and licensing—giving authors and creators the tools to catalog their work, set their own licensing terms, and receive fair compensation when AI systems train on their content. The company holds four patents filed with the USPTO and has been called “the NASDAQ for intellectual property.”
Tomas is also writing Content Creators Be Damned: The Story of Building Infrastructure Big Tech Ignored, chronicling the journey from rejected copyright registrations to building the verification systems that new laws like the EU AI Act and proposed U.S. legislation are already demanding. He lives in Fauquier County, VA, with his family, and believes that creators deserve infrastructure as sophisticated as the AI systems consuming their work.
