Interoperability
Content provenance in the AI era is not one standard — it is a layered set of them, each answering a different question. Made Mark fills the slot none of the others claim: human-readable authorship disclosure. Everything else, it composes with.
Four questions, four layers, one carrier
A single image or web page can carry all of these at once. They don't compete for the same job — they stack.
Is this provenance record authentic and unaltered?
A cryptographically signed manifest — the secure envelope. It can wrap the authorship claim and prove who asserted it.
Who — or what — made this?
Three plain-language marks: Human Made · Human Designed, AI Made · AI Made. A controlled vocabulary a person reads without tooling.
mm: → https://mademark.org/ns/
How may it be reused — and how should AI treat it?
CC licenses (legal reuse terms) and CC Signals (preferences for AI use). Beside authorship, never overlapping it.
Who to credit, contact, bill?
The established photo-metadata fields. Made Mark adds the human-versus-AI axis they never had.
On the open web
<script type="application/ld+json"> in the head
Inside the file
APP1 / iTXt / <metadata> — travels with the bytes
How Made Mark relates to each
The test of a standard is whether implementers can adopt it without giving anything up. Made Mark is designed to be additive to every row below.
| Standard | Answers | Carrier | Trust model | Made Mark's relationship |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| C2PAContent Credentials | Is this provenance record authentic and unaltered? | Signed manifest in the file | Cryptographic — X.509 signing | Rides inside it. The Made Mark statement is carried as a C2PA assertion; C2PA proves it hasn't been tampered with, Made Mark makes the manifest legible to a human. |
| Schema.orgstructured data | What does the open web know about this page? | JSON-LD in the page head | Declarative — crawler-trusted | Is a carrier for it. The mark expresses as a CreativeWork extension, making authorship machine-discoverable at web scale. |
| Creative Commonslicenses + signals | How may it be reused — and how should AI use it? | XMP/RDF, HTML, dataset signals | Declarative — legal + preference | Sits beside it. CC expresses reuse terms and AI-use preferences; Made Mark expresses authorship. Non-overlapping namespaces on the same carrier — a file can hold both. |
| IPTC / XMP Rightsphoto metadata | Who to credit, contact, and bill? | XMP/RDF in the file | Declarative | Neighbors it. Made Mark coexists with creator, credit, and rights fields and adds the human-versus-AI authorship axis they lack. |
One file, every layer
Because the layers stack rather than compete, a single image's metadata can carry all of them together — each in its own namespace, wrapped by a C2PA manifest that makes the whole record tamper-evident.
<!-- XMP / RDF inside portrait.jpg -->
<rdf:Description rdf:about=""
xmlns:mm="https://mademark.org/ns/"
xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#"
xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/">
<!-- authorship — Made Mark -->
<mm:mark>https://mademark.org/marks/human-designed-ai-made</mm:mark>
<mm:model>Claude Opus 4.8</mm:model>
<!-- usage — Creative Commons -->
<cc:license rdf:resource="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"/>
<!-- credit — IPTC / Dublin Core -->
<dc:creator>Alex Rivera</dc:creator>
</rdf:Description>
<!-- …the file is then signed as a C2PA manifest that
references the above, making the record tamper-evident. -->
Four standards, four namespaces, one file — none contradicting another. Verify any of it on the verify page.
The Creative Commons fit
Creative Commons has spent two decades on what you may do with a work — its licenses. It is now extending into the AI era with CC Signals: a values-based framework for expressing how creators want their work used in AI training — preferences backed by a social contract, not copyright. Made Mark answers the adjacent question neither was built to carry: who or what made it.
Creative Commons
“How may this be reused, and how should AI use it?”Reuse terms and AI-use preferences — CC licenses and CC Signals.
Made Mark
“Was this made by a person, an AI, or both?”Authorship disclosure. Three human-readable marks.
They share the same RDF/XMP carrier, use separate namespaces, and never contradict each other — so a work can be labeled with both at once. That is the case for treating Made Mark as a complement to the commons, not a competitor for the same slot.
Implementing across the stack
The schemas for each carrier — JSON-LD, XMP, and the C2PA assertion — live on the Implement page, with copy-paste examples. How the vocabulary and URIs stay stable as the ecosystem evolves is set out in Governance.