Your consent stops being a request.
You upload a drawing, and from that moment you have no say. Someone traces it. Someone feeds it into a training set. Someone crops out your signature and signs it themselves. You can write "please, no tracing" in the caption — and that is it. That is a request a person reads, not a rule a program understands.
We turned it into a rule a program understands. Your terms now live inside the file itself and travel with it wherever it goes. Tools that know the standard check them before they do anything.
What this means in practice
A declaration stops being information and becomes program behaviour. Three examples from tools that already do this.
A tracing tool won't open the file. It will say who refused, and what.
The work won't load onto a reference board.
The file won't open for reworking.
Looking is always allowed. The refusal applies to using the work, never to viewing it.
Ready-made sets
Pick one and it's done. Every field can still be adjusted on its own afterwards.
Nic bez pytania autora.
Można patrzeć, nie można kopiować ani udostępniać dalej.
Można pokazywać dalej, jeśli widać, kto to narysował.
Kalkuj i rysuj z tego do ćwiczeń — tylko nie publikuj efektu.
Rysuj z tego, co widzisz — wspomnij, skąd wziąłeś.
Darmowa baza: przerabiaj i publikuj z podaniem autora, ale nie odsprzedawaj samej bazy.
Baza płatna: to samo co F2U, ale po zakupie u autora.
Wszystko wolno, jeśli podasz autora.
The fields you decide on
| Kopiowanie na inne serwisy | Czy serwis może zapisać kopię pliku u siebie? Wolno kopiować · Tylko odnośnik · Za zgodą · Zakaz |
| Udostępnianie na innym koncie | Czy ktoś może wrzucić tę pracę na swój profil? Wolno · Wolno z podaniem autora · Zakaz |
| Edycja | Czy wolno przerabiać tę pracę? Wolno · Wolno z podaniem autora · Zakaz |
| Kalkowanie | Czy wolno rysować po tej pracy? Wolno · Tylko do nauki · Zakaz |
| Referencja | Czy wolno rysować na podstawie tej pracy? Wolno · Wolno z podaniem autora · Zakaz |
| Baza do przerobienia | Czy ta praca jest udostępniona jako baza? To nie jest baza · F2U — darmowa baza · P2U — baza płatna |
| Użycie komercyjne | Czy wolno zarabiać na wykorzystaniu tej pracy? Wolno · Do uzgodnienia · Zakaz |
| Podanie autora | Czy trzeba oznaczyć autora przy publikacji? Wymagane · Mile widziane · Niepotrzebne |
| Trenowanie modeli AI | Czy wolno użyć tej pracy do eksploracji danych i trenowania modeli? Nie zajmuję stanowiska · Wolno · Zakaz trenowania AI · Zakaz trenowania modeli generatywnych · Tylko indeksowanie w wyszukiwarkach · Zakaz całkowity · Zakaz, warunki osobno |
Pinterest doesn't do this. We do.
Let's say it plainly, because it's a difference that matters to every illustrator.
- Copies the work to its own servers and serves it from its own address, in several sizes at once.
- That processing strips the metadata — the name, the rights, the terms all stop existing in the file people download.
- The link to the "source" leads wherever the person who pinned it got it from, and very often that isn't the author's page.
- There's no field there where you could say "don't trace this". There's nothing to switch off, because there's nothing to switch on.
- Import reads your declaration from the file before it decides what to do with it.
- A ban on copying means the pin stays a link to your own server. No copy with us.
- A ban on use means the file doesn't come in at all, and the reason gets recorded.
- When a file legally reaches us, the declaration travels with it into our own copy. A standard that loses its own data has nothing to demand of anyone else.
We're not claiming to be bigger. We're claiming that we ask the author for an opinion, and there's nowhere to ask that question — and that an illustrator has the right to know which of those two things is happening to their work.
A file can be cropped away. A registry can't.
Almost every editor and almost every social platform strips metadata — sometimes deliberately, most often just while shrinking the file. A standard resting solely on what sits inside the file falls over the first time that happens.
That's why the original of your declaration lives with us. The file carries a copy. When the copy disappears or gets swapped, we recognise the work by its content and recover the terms from the registry — and we call out the mismatch outright, instead of pretending everything checks out.
Changing the terms never applies retroactively. Whoever downloaded your work in March acted under March's terms, and that's documented. The history of every change is public, dated and described, visible to anyone who views the certificate.
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.
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.
Set it once and get back to drawing
You pick your default terms in your profile. From that moment every new piece of work goes out carrying your rules inside it, with not one extra click.
