What Lantern is
Proof first. Then action.
Lantern protects digital art in three connected parts: a public record of authorship that nothing can strip away, a model built to recognize your work in any disguise, and a clear path from evidence to takedown. This page explains how the pieces fit.
Theft outruns the tools.
Art is stolen by reposting, cropping, filtering, screenshotting, and increasingly by AI systems that generate close derivatives. Every traditional defense marks the file itself, and the file is exactly what keeps changing: visible watermarks get cropped out, embedded credentials vanish with a single re-save, platform badges stay on the platform. By the time a copy has traveled twice, the mark is gone and the proof went with it.
Keep the record itself.
Lantern stores nothing inside your file. Registering a work derives a set of fingerprints, from an exact cryptographic hash down to neural embeddings of the image itself, and anchors them in a public registry with a timestamp no one can quietly rewrite. When a copy surfaces, its fingerprints are recomputed and matched back to your registration, even from a crop of a screenshot of a repost.
Candela does the finding.
Matching is powered by Candela, our own image recognition model, trained for one question: are these two images the same work? It is built to separate the same work in altered form from different works in a similar style, because the difference between those two is the difference between evidence and an accusation. Every match carries a similarity score whose thresholds are tuned against measured outcomes. A geometric verification stage, which checks that corresponding points between two images agree on one consistent transformation, is in development and will produce evidence a person can look at and check.
Evidence first.
A match on its own does not fix anything. Lantern is being built to turn it into something you can act on: the registration record, the match, and the verification, assembled into a takedown notice you review and send. The evidence comes first so you are never guessing in public, and the decision to act will always be yours.
A ledger no one owns.
Registrations are anchored to a public blockchain ledger: timestamped, tamper-evident, and readable by anyone without asking Lantern. If Lantern disappeared tomorrow, your records would remain and any reader could still confirm them. You never touch a wallet, a key, or a token.
Artists keep control.
You choose what to register, what to protect, what to link, and when to act. Lantern is the caretaker of the registry, not the owner of the work. Every action is recorded, and every action is yours.
Credit, never suspicion.
Lantern marks what it can verify and stays silent about everything else. The absence of a record means there is nothing to say yet, not that a work is fake. A provenance tool that treats no-signal as guilt becomes an accusation tool, and we refuse to build that.
Authorship does not require identity.
A work can be registered without linking any account or sharing a legal name. Linking adds trust; it is never required. Public artists and pseudonymous artists get the same protection.
- Not a marketplace. Lantern does not sell, license, or broker work.
- Not an NFT. A registration is a record, not a tradeable asset.
- Not an AI detector. Lantern answers who registered a work, not how an image was made.
For questions from artists, platforms, press, or anyone who cares about this work, contact@lantern-us.com.
Curious what's changed lately? See the changelog.