About Bakau

Bakau finds copies of an image and records who made what, so that rights can be read by software and by buyers.

Who

Joseph Sherrier, founder. A Mathematics and Computing student at Georgia Tech, and a photographer. Bakau is a solo project at an early stage, still finding its form. There is no team behind it yet.

Why

Creative work is copied, stripped of its metadata and gathered into training sets without anyone asking the people who made it. Consent cannot mean much while no one can say which copies are the same picture or who made it. Bakau builds that record first, so a creator's yes or no can be attached to their work and travel with it.

Why the name

Bakau means "mangrove" in Malay, Indonesian and Sundanese. A mangrove holds the shoreline together; the aim is to keep the record of who made what from washing away.

What this site keeps

• No images. Images tried here are read in memory for one request and discarded.
• No tracking. No analytics, no cookies for visitors, and nothing loaded from anyone else's servers.
• A short-lived count against your network address, so nobody can hammer the site, cleared within the hour.

Code

The code is source-available under the PolyForm Noncommercial License 1.0.0; commercial use needs a licence from Bakau. The repository is not public yet. Ask for access.

Contact

outreach@bakau.org for partnerships, audits and anything else. support@bakau.org for problems with the site, including security flaws.