Authorship protocol / INKID-PROTO v0.9 · 37-dim spec published

Verification infrastructure for human authorship in the AI era.

Anyone can generate a song.
Only one person could have written yours. InkID. Proof of human.

InkID captures behavioral evidence of human authorship at the moment of creation — invisibly, while you write, in any tool the protocol runs in. Every InkID-anchored work comes with a cryptographically signed, independently timestamped record of creative process that current AI workflows do not reproduce and post-hoc detectors are not built to evaluate.

InkID /ˈɪŋk-aɪ-diː/ noun.
A cryptographically anchored record of behavioral evidence of human authorship, independently timestamped, publicly verifiable.

Writers who anchor their catalogue with InkID will have something a writer in 2026 cannot otherwise obtain: a verifiable, evidence-grade, publisher-readable record of authorship process, anchored to a moment in time that cannot be back-filled.

Your catalogue deserves protection.

Your work deserves attribution.

Your authorship deserves to mean something.

Explore the protocol → Join the InkWave waitlist
In quiet conversation with publishers, editorial organizations, and authorship-rights bodies. Public announcements as they're ready.
The problem

Authorship can no longer be assumed.

2022
The year a draft, an email, a song, a brief could no longer be assumed to be written by a person.
∞
The supply of plausible text the moment authorship stopped being scarce.

For most of recorded history, the question of who wrote this answered itself. A document existed because a person had sat with it. The act left traces — drafts, revisions, an idiom of mind — that were costly to fake and impossible to fabricate at scale.

That assumption is gone. Detection tools are downstream of the problem; they grade output after the fact. The world is missing infrastructure that records the act of authorship itself, while it is happening, in a form a publisher or a court can rely on later.

InkID is that infrastructure.

The protocol

Three stages. One verifiable record.

A public methodology for proving human authorship. Open in specification, private in evidence, independent in anchor.

Stage 01 — Capture

Behavioral evidence, in the writing.

While a person writes, InkID records 13+ always-on behavioral dimensions of the editorial process — pause structure, revision rhythm, deletion topology, idea reformulation. Conditional dimensions activate for specific mediums. The full specification publishes 37 dimensions.

pause distribution deletion topology revision cadence idea reformulation + 9 baseline · 24 conditional
Stage 02 — Anchor

Independent cryptographic timestamp.

The evidence bundle is hashed and submitted to an RFC 3161 Time-Stamp Authority (FreeTSA at launch; redundant anchors planned). The TSA does not see the writing — only its hash. The returned token is non-repudiable and independent of InkID.

sha-256 evidence digest RFC 3161 TSA token ed25519 author signature redundant anchors — planned
Stage 03 — Resolve

Public record, private control.

The result is an InkID — a resolvable identifier whose record describes the captured evidence in process language. The author chooses what is published; cryptographic erasure removes evidence on revocation. Methodology is public; per-author weights are not.

resolvable identifier selective publication cryptographic erasure Kerckhoffs's principle — applied
Independence

The anchor does not depend on us.

Who verifies the verifier — not us.

The cryptographic timestamp is issued by a third party — at launch, FreeTSA, an independent RFC 3161 Time-Stamp Authority operated outside InkID's control. The TSA receives only a hash. It does not see the writing. It does not depend on InkID's continued existence.

Redundant anchors across multiple independent TSAs are on the roadmap. The protocol is designed so that, if InkID disappears tomorrow, every record made under it remains verifiable.

— who verifies the verifier — not us —

Open standard

Content Credentials, by the open standard.

Every InkID is a signed content credential in the C2PA-compatible format — the open standard adopted by the broader Content Authenticity Initiative.

Adopted by Adobe Microsoft BBC Sony Content Authenticity Initiative

Your credential carries

  1. 01 First-person authorship statementyour words, your record
  2. 02 Process recordof how the work was made
  3. 03 AI training rights directivestandard machine-readable format
  4. 04 Cryptographic signatureindependent TSA · RFC 3161

Any ecosystem tool, publisher, or AI lab supporting the standard can read your credential — no InkID-specific software needed. Credentials are publicly downloadable as JSON from your work's verification page.

Live, on this page

Resolve an InkID in front of you.

The protocol is a published, public surface. Paste an identifier and the record returns inline — no account, no waiting. The widget on this page is InkVerify.

Anchor — FreeTSA · RFC 3161 Methodology — INKID-PROTO/v0.9 · 37-dim spec
The products

Six surfaces. One protocol.

InkID is the protocol. Each product is an interface to it — evidence that the protocol works in the real world.

InkWave

Launching · iOS
Mobile songwriting

A writing surface built for songwriters, with InkID anchoring on every session. Analytical AI assists; never generates. iOS launches first; ~60 days.

InkWave overview →

InkFolio Web

In development
Universal writing platform

Composition modes for freeform, essay, short-form, screenplay, newsletter, and story writers. Same protocol; medium-aware capture.

InkFolio Web →

InkProof Ext.

In development
Browser extension

Author and verify on public publishing surfaces — LinkedIn, X, Substack, Medium. Operates only on public surfaces.

InkProof Ext. →

InkVerify

Live
Public resolver

The public surface where any InkID resolves to its record. No account; no fee. The widget on this page is hosted here.

InkVerify →

InkVault

Coming soon
Songwriters' back-catalogue

A catalogue surface for pre-InkWave work — drafts, demos, lyric notebooks — anchored after the fact. Lives inside InkVerify.

InkVault →

InkTrust

In development
Publisher dashboard

A B2B surface for publishers, labels, and editorial organizations managing their writers' InkIDs at organizational scale.

InkTrust overview →
The methodology is public

Specification, peer review, evidentiary review.

The 37-dimension protocol specification is published under INKID-PROTO/v0.9 — dimension definitions, activation rules per medium, the timestamp procedure, the signature scheme. Per-author weighting is private. Kerckhoffs's principle, applied to authorship. Peer-reviewed publication and structured Daubert-readiness review are on the roadmap.

Read the specification → View the lexicon →
Anti-positioning

What InkID is not.

The protocol is precise about what it does. It is just as precise about what it does not do — and what it will never claim.

  • NotAn AI detector.InkID records human evidence at the source. It does not classify output after the fact.
  • NotA plagiarism checker.Authorship and originality are different questions.
  • NotA copyright or DRM system.Records describe process. Rights remain with the author.
  • NotA blockchain product.Anchors are independent RFC 3161 timestamps. No coin; no chain.
  • NotA generative-AI watermark.The protocol is not embedded in model output. It captures human work directly.
Privacy by design

What InkID does not collect.

The smallest evidence sufficient for verification — never more. The protocol's scope is constrained on purpose, and named explicitly.

  • NotKeystroke-level timing.Removed from the protocol over biometric-privacy concerns. Editorial metrics are counter-based, not rhythmic.
  • NotVoice biometrics.Vocal recordings stay on-device and are never embedded. Only instrumental audio is fingerprinted — with consent, with classification.
  • NotCross-session identity matching.The protocol assesses session quality. It does not maintain population-level identity fingerprints.
  • NotBehavioral data from email or messaging surfaces.InkID does not operate there — by design, and by federal law.
  • NotBehavioral data without an author's active session.There is no passive collection. Ever.
What we're really protecting

The labor that makes creators.

A novelist becomes a novelist by writing novels.

A songwriter becomes a songwriter by writing songs.

The labor of creation isn't just how art gets made.

It's how a person becomes themselves.

When the work is done by a machine, the artifact still appears. But no human is shaped by having made it. No one learns what they think by struggling to say it. No one discovers who they are by finishing what they started.

We don't just lose songs and stories.

We lose the people who would have become themselves by making them.

InkID exists to protect the labor that makes creators. Not just the work — the becoming underneath the work.

Read the full manifesto
The right

Authorship, restored.

A right that needed infrastructure.

Authorship has always been a quiet right. The right to put words down and have them be yours. The right to be the named source of an idea you actually had. The right not to have someone else's machine pass off its output as your own work — and the right not to have your own work be mistaken for a machine's.

That right was assumed, for centuries, because no machine could imitate the act of writing convincingly. The assumption did the work that infrastructure now has to do.

InkID is the infrastructure that does the work the assumption no longer can.

For the writer asked, by an editor or a regulator or a reader, did you write this? For the songwriter whose split sheet is challenged years after the room dispersed. For the journalist who wakes up to a comment thread accusing them of using AI. For the novelist whose ghostwriter rumor has nothing real to push back against. For all of them, until now, the answer has been a story — yes, I remember writing it — and a story is no longer enough.

The protocol turns the story into a record. The record is yours. The record is verifiable. The record exists outside InkID, outside any platform, anchored to a time no one — not a competitor, not a court, not the future — can move.

The right to be the author of your own work was never a feature. It was a fact. The InkID protocol is the fact, kept.

Authorship is yours. The proof is independent. The right stands.
InkID — Editorial principle
The philosophical anchor

Bill of Creator Rights.

Seven commitments the protocol is built around. The record exists to serve the author — never the other way around.

Read the full Bill →
  1. The author owns the evidence of their authorship, in full.
  2. The protocol describes process; it does not render verdicts.
  3. Methodology is public. Per-author weights are private.
  4. Revocation is cryptographic, not promissory. Erasure is real.
  5. No record is made without the author's active session.
  6. Anchors are independent of InkID, the company.
  7. Selective disclosure: publish what you choose, withhold the rest.
For whom

A record that holds up across rooms.

The studio. The newsroom. The legal review. The writers' chair.

Working songwriters
A record of authorship that travels with a song from the writers' room to the split sheet to the publisher.
via InkWave
Professional writers
Evidence the piece was written — the way one writes, not the way one prompts — when the question gets asked.
via InkFolio Web
Music publishers & A&R
Authorship records for the writers on the roster, organized at catalogue scale.
via InkTrust
Journalists & editors
A protocol-level answer to who wrote this, resolvable from outside the publication.
via InkVerify
Courts & counsel
A protocol-level answer for the rooms where authorship is contested — issued, timestamped, signed, and resolvable from outside the platform.
via InkVerify
— Ink, anchored —

Authorship is worth recording.

Read the protocol specification, or join the InkWave waitlist — iOS launches in the next sixty days.

Read the protocol → Join the InkWave waitlist