Direction

• Provenance at the point of creation. Extensions inside creative apps that record a work's digital fingerprints and timestamp as it is made, without the creator doing anything extra. Needs: a partner app with an extension platform, and the engine in a language that app can load.
• An evidence trail of where work appeared. Reverse search across platforms and reference collections, recording where and when an image was seen. It would show where and when, never who made it. Needs: index access granted by platforms and collections, and search that scales past millions of images.
• Freelancers paid inside publisher licensing. Per-image attribution inside publisher-level licences, such as RSL, so the people who made each image are paid their share. Needs: a licensing collective willing to use per-image attribution, and contributor records to match against.
• Collective licensing with photographers' associations. A trusted record of who made what, a mandate to license together, and monitoring of use. Needs: an association whose members say yes, a legal entity, and counsel.

Today's work, audits and the matching engine, builds the record these depend on.