A Watermark You Can Crop Is Not Provenance
The European Commission's new Code of Practice on labelling artificial-intelligence-generated content asks producers to mark their output, but a watermark you can crop, recompress, or strip is a label, not provenance. Genuine compliance needs cryptographic provenance signed at the moment of creation.Originally published at https://mickai.co.uk/articles/a-watermark-you-can-crop-is-not-provenance. Mickai is a Sovereign Intelligence Operating System; the Open Audit Record signs every artificial intelligence action before it executes, post-quantum and offline-verifiable. 101 filed UK patent applications, Mickai LTD (Companies House 17166618).
Authors
- Micky Irons (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0000-5511-5858)
Institutions
- Maryland Institute College of Art (US)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
- Published
- 2026-06-13
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20674254
- Primary Topic
- Law, AI, and Intellectual Property
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00