Certificate of authorship
Your work stops needing your word for it.
You find your artwork on somebody else's profile. Cropped so the signature falls outside the frame. No metadata, no trace. You say it's yours — the other side says it's theirs. You show your source files, and everyone in the room knows a date on a disk can be changed in three seconds.
The certificate ends that conversation. Not because anyone takes your word for it — because nobody has to take anyone's word for it.
We cut a piece covering nine percent out of a certified image and scaled it down on top of that. The number read back without a single error. Screenshots, compression and rescaling do not touch it either — it does not live in the metadata, it lives in the picture.
We are not among them either. We write the date into the Bitcoin blockchain, outside Moonlight. We could delete your account, shut the service down, go bankrupt — the date stays.
The proof is a file smaller than a kilobyte. You download it once and check it with your own software — no account, no permission from us, and even if Moonlight ever disappeared.
How it works, in three steps
You pick a set or set the fields by hand: tracing, reference use, reworking, reposting, model training. Those terms go into the registry and into the file's metadata. Change your mind and you can change them any time, and the old version stays in the history with a date. Whoever downloaded the work in March acted under March's terms, and that's documented.
We weave it into the pixels themselves — below the threshold where the eye notices anything. It isn't a signature in the corner or a watermark across the middle; the artwork looks exactly like you drew it. That number leads straight to your certificate and survives what erases everything else.
They drop the file onto the verification page and get an answer: whose work it is, on what terms it may be used, and what that recognition is based on. Graphics software queries our public API — no key, no agreement, no asking our permission.
New
Software knows what you allowed. Even offline
Nearly every service strips metadata, and your rules go with it. So we write the four that matter most into the picture itself — software reads them from any copy of your work.
tracing use as reference reworking AI model training
What sits in the picture reflects the rules from the day that copy was made. Treat it as a warning: when there is a connection, what counts is what the author has set right now.
You say what people may do with your work
You tick what you agree to. You can change it whenever you like.
-
Copying to other services
May a service keep its own copy of the file?
Copying allowed · Link only · By permission · Forbidden
-
Reposting on another account
May somebody post this work on their own profile?
Allowed · Allowed with credit · Forbidden
-
Editing readable offline
May this work be altered?
Allowed · Allowed with credit · Forbidden
-
Tracing readable offline
May this work be drawn over?
Allowed · Study only · Forbidden
-
Reference use readable offline
May this work be drawn from?
Allowed · Allowed with credit · Forbidden
-
Base for reworking
Is this work published as a base?
Not a base · F2U — free base · P2U — paid base
-
Commercial use
May money be made from using this work?
Allowed · By arrangement · Forbidden
-
Attribution
Must the author be credited on publication?
Required · Appreciated · Not needed
-
Data mining and model training readable offline
May this work be used for data mining and model training?
No position taken · Allowed · No model training · No generative model training · Search indexing only · Prohibited entirely · Prohibited, terms stated separately
A change applies from today, never backwards. Whoever downloaded your work in March is bound by the rules that applied in March — and it is there in black and white.
Why nobody else gives you this
Your decision on model training travels in the file as a C2PA assertion — the same one major manufacturers' tools already look at. A format of our own would have been easier to build and useless outside our own service: a declaration nobody reads protects nobody.
Licences from around the internet answer the question "am I allowed to copy this". An illustrator is asking something else: can I trace this, use it as a reference, build a base off it. No widespread standard answers that today — so we added the fields for it.
Other certificate services say: “trust our register.” We say: you do not have to trust us, check for yourself. We keep the date in the blockchain, where we have no say — we could not change it even if we wanted to. Until there is a dispute this sounds like a detail. In a dispute it is everything.
Even when everything else is gone from a file — metadata, number, name — a comparison of the image itself remains. The registry recognises the work by what it shows, and states plainly how confident it is. A result without that confidence figure is just guessing.
What this doesn't do
This is not a technical safeguard. Anyone can take a screenshot, and a program that ignores the declaration ignores it with impunity. Promising "nobody will copy this" would be a lie, and we're not selling it as one.
What the standard does instead is remove the excuse. Until now, anyone could say "how was I supposed to know". Now they know — because it's written in the file they're holding. And if they break the rules, there's a date, a signature and a record of what they actually agreed to.
Want to support this in your software?
The format is open and our API answers with no key and no contract. The AI-training decision is written as a C2PA assertion — the same one that tools from major vendors already read.
