See who made this.

Every digital artist has watched a piece of their own work travel somewhere they didn't send it. The file shows up on a different account, with a different caption, sometimes a different name. The thread connecting the image back to the person who actually drew it thins with every repost.

The tools for fixing this have never quite worked. Watermarks get cropped out. Signatures baked into a file vanish the moment someone takes a screenshot. Platform-specific marks don't survive a trip to another platform. Reverse image search is a last resort, and only if you think to go looking.

We think the problem is that every one of those tools tries to mark the file. Files keep getting rewritten. What's needed is a record that doesn't live inside the file at all.

Artists keep control.

You register. You link the accounts you want linked. You take a registration back if you change your mind. Lantern is the caretaker of the ledger, not the owner of your work. Every move you make is visible in the record, and every move belongs to you.

Credit, never suspicion.

We mark the work we can verify. We don't put a warning label on everything else. Silence means we have nothing to say yet, not that a piece is fake. The moment we start treating no-signal as a signal, we've made a tool for accusing people, and that isn't what we're building.

Authorship doesn't require identity.

You can register a piece without ever linking a social account. Linking adds trust (it lets viewers match a registration back to an artist they already follow), but it isn't required. Some artists share their legal name, some keep the rest of their life private. Both choices are valid, and both are supported.

Plain language, never jargon.

The registry runs on machinery that has to be durable and independent, because a registry that only works as long as one company is around isn't really a registry. You should never have to think about any of that to use it. You'll see registered, verified, and disputed. Everything underneath stays underneath unless you want to read about it.

For the curious: the registry lives in a shared public record that we can't quietly edit. It's open for anyone to read, and readable independently of Lantern as a company. If we disappear tomorrow, the record is still there, and another reader can still confirm what's in it. That independence is the entire point.