INTELLECTUAL SOVEREIGNTY PROTOCOL (ISP)

The Intellectual Sovereignty Protocol (ISP): Scoped Rights Graphs and Challengeable Cross-Reference Attestations for Creative Works On and Off Chain Systems that record creative works on blockchains often treat as one thing what law, commerce and scholarship keep apart. A content hash is shown as a title, a token transfer as a copyright assignment, a valid signature as a verified identity, and embedding similarity as plagiarism. This preprint presents the core of the Intellectual Sovereignty Protocol (ISP), an open, chain-agnostic protocol for the identity, provenance, rights and licensing of intellectual works, including books, poems, paintings, photographs, recordings, films and series. ISP has no blockchain, consensus layer or token of its own. It reuses existing standards (C2PA, CAWG, ISCC/ISO 24138, W3C DID, Verifiable Credentials, ODRL and PROV-O, and EVM signature standards) and contributes the following: A typed object model that separates the logical work from its expressions, manifestations, renditions, copies, rights, grants and claims. It forbids implicit conversions between them; for example, a copy transfer never becomes a copyright assignment. The Rights Graph, a temporal, scoped and contestable graph of propositions rather than a register of titles. Its authorization semantics use three-valued (strong Kleene) logic, so missing evidence produces INDETERMINATE instead of a default ALLOW. The decision is proven to be monotone in information. An exclusive-capacity reservation protocol that prevents the same exclusive right from being exercised twice across chains, with a safety proof under explicit assumptions. The Cross-Reference Oracle (CRO), a federated attestation service organized in five families: F1 Provenance & References, F2 Identity & Attribution, F3 Contract & Rights, F4 Revenue & Commerce and F5 Delivery & Disputes. It separates deterministic verification, retrieval, statistical inference and human review into distinct tiers, and its output is a signed, scoped, multi-dimensional and challengeable attestation, never a verdict. Both formal properties are checked on an executable reference model. Over 200,000 randomized instances, three-valued authorization produced no false ALLOW decisions, while a closed-world baseline wrongly allowed 17–58% of the requests it allowed. Over 500 randomized two-chain schedules, the reservation protocol produced no exclusivity violations, while siloed registries and a lock-and-mint bridge violated exclusivity in every run. The paper also sets out a preregistrable evaluation agenda for the CRO’s multimodal components (text, image, audio and video). Contents of this record Preprint (PDF) LaTeX source package (main.tex, refs.bib, main.bbl) Executable reference model (isp_model.py) and its raw results (results.json) Status and scopeThis is a research preprint, version 2.0-alpha. ISP components are research proposals, not ratified standards. The multimodal oracle components have not yet been validated empirically. Nothing in this work is legal advice, and no hash, token or attestation in ISP creates copyright, priority, trademark rights or legal originality.