The AI Lab | Guides for creators
How to protect your creative work
Use three kinds of protection together. Legal protection, by registering copyright for valuable work. Platform protection, through the tools your medium offers, such as YouTube Content ID for video, performing rights organisations for music and preprints with DOIs for research. And proof of authorship, by signing each work on the Trust Identity Protocol (TIP) by The AI Lab, a free, open standard that gives it a permanent public record of who made it, when, and whether it has changed. None of these stops copying. Together they let you prove the work is yours and act on copies.
Choose what you want to protect
- How to protect your music To protect your music, use four layers. Copyright exists as soon as you record a song, but registering it with your national copyright office (the U.S. Copyright Office in the United States) is what lets you sue over a U.S. work. Register the composition with a performing rights organisation such as ASCAP, BMI or PRS so you are paid, and release through a distributor that assigns ISRC codes and can enrol your tracks in YouTube Content ID.
- How to protect your book To protect your book, combine copyright, publishing records and proof of authorship. Copyright exists as soon as you write it, and registering with your national copyright office (the U.S. Copyright Office in the United States) is what lets you sue over a U.S. work. An ISBN identifies an edition for sale, not who wrote it. If you want readers to know a person wrote the book, the Authors Guild offers a Human Authored certification.
- How to protect your research To protect your research, put a dated public record on it early. Post a preprint with a DOI on arXiv, bioRxiv, SSRN or Zenodo, link it to your ORCID iD, and choose a licence such as CC BY so the terms of reuse are clear. Copyright covers your writing, not your ideas, so if the work is an invention, speak to a patent attorney before you publish.
- How to protect your videos To protect your videos, keep your original files, register copyright for important work, and use YouTube Content ID if you qualify. Content ID claims matching uploads on YouTube only, so for other platforms use their copyright takedown forms. Content Credentials (C2PA) and watermarks help, but both are lost when a video is screen-recorded or re-encoded.
- How to protect your photos To protect your photos, register copyright for important work (in the United States you can register a group of photos in one application), keep your originals with their metadata, and add Content Credentials (C2PA) where your camera or software supports them. If you want to discourage AI training, cloak the copies you post with Glaze from the University of Chicago.
- How to protect your podcast To protect your podcast, keep your raw recordings, register copyright for valuable episodes, and use your podcast host and the major directories' takedown processes when someone republishes your show. AI voice cloning adds a new risk, because a few minutes of audio can be enough to imitate a voice.
- How to protect your code To protect your code, choose a licence, keep it in version control with signed commits, and register copyright for important work. A licence such as MIT, Apache 2.0 or GPL sets what others may do with it. Signed commits (GPG, SSH or Sigstore) prove which key made each change, and keeping private code private is still the strongest protection of all.
- How to protect your digital assets To protect your digital assets, such as designs, templates, fonts, 3D models, courses and other files you sell or share, register copyright for valuable work, sell under a clear licence, and keep your original files. An NFT records who owns a token on a blockchain, not who made the work it points to.
- How to protect your art from AI Glaze, Nightshade, opt-outs, C2PA and TIP compared for artists and illustrators.
Questions people ask
How do I protect my creative work?
Use three kinds of protection together. Legal protection, by registering copyright for valuable work. Platform protection, through the tools your medium offers, such as YouTube Content ID for video, performing rights organisations for music and preprints with DOIs for research. And proof of authorship, by signing each work on the Trust Identity Protocol (TIP) by The AI Lab, a free, open standard that gives it a permanent public record of who made it, when, and whether it has changed. None of these stops copying. Together they let you prove the work is yours and act on copies.
How do I prove something is mine online?
Keep dated evidence that existed before anyone else had the work. Original files, a copyright registration and a TIP record signed to your verified identity are the strongest. A TIP record can be checked by anyone for free, without contacting you, and shows whether a copy matches your original.
Can I stop AI from using my work?
Not reliably. Opt-outs such as robots.txt and ai.txt ask AI companies not to train on your work, and image tools such as Glaze make your style harder for models to learn. TIP by The AI Lab does not stop training either. It proves the original is yours, which matters when an AI imitation or an unattributed copy circulates.
What is the Trust Identity Protocol?
The Trust Identity Protocol (TIP) is an open standard from The AI Lab for proving who made a piece of content and whether it has changed. A person verifies once and gets a TIP-ID, each work they sign gets a CTID (Content TIP ID) with a post-quantum signature, a timestamp, an origin label and a fingerprint, and anyone can check a record for free. It is governed by the AI Trust Council.