Agency.
Consent.
Attribution.
Permanently protected.

AI systems can now generate convincing synthetic representations of any individual at industrial scale, in seconds, at negligible cost. The rights performers, athletes, musicians, and creators hold over their own identities are increasingly legally stated and technically unenforceable.

The law has created rights. The market has created harms. The infrastructure that would connect the two does not yet exist at scale. HAND exists to build that infrastructure — and has been building it since 2021.

A trade association can operate a registry. Only a foundation can hold the standard in permanent public trust — beyond acquisition, beyond redirection, beyond the reach of any single commercial interest. The Foundation is the structural guarantee that what HAND has built cannot become what it was built to prevent.

HAND governs the standard. The Foundation supports the mission. Persistence by design.

Those involved in the creation and interpretation of artistic works such as literature, music, dance, movies and television should have the right:

1. To be unambiguously identified through machine readable codes that can be associated with their endeavours.
2. To have their name and an unambiguous code associated with their endeavours when they elect to require this.
3. For this association to be a technically robust binding so that it is hard to remove the association.
4. To be able to license, or refuse to license, their Name, Image and Likeness (NIL — including their vocal timbre and style) for the creation of digital replicas.
5. To have their name and unambiguous code robustly associated (when they require it) with digital replicas in a way that makes it clear that the replica uses the NIL of the creator but does not capture the creator themselves.
6. To have an unambiguous code associated (when they require it) with each distinct authorised digital replica so that compliance with the relevant licence can be ascertained.
7. To be protected from digital replicas that assert or imply that they capture the creator themselves.
8. To be protected from digital replicas that are not in compliance with the licence conditions applicable to the identity of the relevant replica.
9. To be protected from captures and digital replicas that are associated with names or codes that are incorrect, whether or not this is done in pursuit of gain by the party involved.

These rights were written in October 2023 and first published that November — before AB 1836 became law, before the EU AI Act’s transparency rules took effect, before the NO FAKES Act cleared committee in the U.S. Senate. Each of the nine rights above now echoes in statute, in collective bargaining, or in litigation. This is not a manifesto that has aged. This is a manifesto that is right, and meets the moment today. The Foundation exists to ensure the infrastructure those rights require endures permanently.

The term "digital replica" appears in this Manifesto as originally written in 2023, predating HAND Foundation's adoption of "Licensed Human Likeness" as its canonical definition. While California AB 1836 (signed September 2024) defines derivative extensions of human likenesses as "digital replicas" requiring the consent of the legal human upon which they are based, HAND Foundation holds that any synthetic likeness of a human being — regardless of statutory classification — is worthy of consent-based protection. The law sets a floor. The Foundation holds the standard higher.

HAND's registry is free to access and free to resolve — ensuring that independent creators, emerging artists, and athletes from underrepresented communities have the same identity infrastructure protections as major studio talent.

The Foundation is not a subsidiary. It is a peer institution — the fourth layer of a governance architecture built on the Handle System, the persistent-resolution infrastructure created by Dr. Robert E. Kahn, co-inventor of TCP/IP, for resilience, extensibility, and longevity.

A registry that only answers "does this identity exist?" is an island. The valuable questions — is this use authorized, did this person consent, is this agent acting on their behalf — are ones a trust network has to answer together. The Foundation is building HAND's place in that wider network deliberately, one open-standard connection at a time.

HAND is building toward the Trust Registry Query Protocol (TRQP) under the Trust Over IP Foundation — an open standard for one trust network to recognize another, integrated once rather than bespoke per partner.

Ecosystem Member · Joined June 2026

Ayra Trust Network

HAND and Ayra are building toward TRQP-based interoperability, so the consent HAND establishes can be recognized by any Ayra-connected verifier with no one-off integration.

1. Oct 2026The registry passes 2.7 million records — 22× growth since June, and free to resolve for anyone.
2. Sept 2026Identity Week America: a joint HAND and CAWG session in Washington, D.C.
3. Sept 2026HAND’s organizational node is ratified in the SMPTE Metadata Registry.
4. Sept 2026All 771 nominees for the 2026 Emmys hold HAND IDs — above and below the line.
5. Aug 2026The registry crosses one million records on August 27.
6. Aug 2026HAND ID becomes Wikidata property P14750, linking HAND IDs into the world’s largest open knowledge graph.
7. July 2026Finland’s Copyright Infrastructure Task Force report records that its actor-identifier expert workshop was facilitated by experts from HAND and WIPO.
8. June 2026The HAND Foundation joins the Ayra Trust Network.

The Advisory Council stands up first. The HAND Foundation’s first Board of Trustees will be drawn from it and announced once constituted.