Partnership integration ladder

For platforms with creators: the integration trajectory beyond Phase 1. Per-work provenance and enforcement.

Audience: A platform partner with an active creator base — an art or journalism community, a stock library — evaluating where an integration could go beyond the umbrella policy-level opt-out. A note on the two names: Akaeon and Stelais are one company, one codebase, one substrate — the same signing, fingerprinting, and Arweave-anchoring pipeline underneath. Akaeon is the registry surface: platform- and publisher-facing, where the partnership commitments live. Stelais is the same registry's creator-facing surface: per-work provenance, the creator dashboard, and enforcement tooling, offered as an individual subscription. The ladder below is not a handoff to a second service — each rung extends the same integration deeper, from domain-level policy to per-work records to active enforcement. Each rung is the platform's decision to take. Companion documents: Publisher integration runbook for Phase 1 onboarding · Architecture for the one substrate both surfaces run on · Technical specification for the cryptographic model.

Phase 1 — Platform-level opt-out (the registry baseline)

Phase 1 is the integration described in the publisher integration runbook, and it is entirely at the registry level: the platform registers a domain-scoped no-training opt-out, proves authority over the domain via a DNS challenge, and the registry anchors the signed record on Arweave. Every creator on the platform inherits that policy-level opt-out automatically; nothing changes in any creator's workflow, and no individual creator account is involved — every creator gets baseline protection without lifting a finger.

Phase 1 stands on its own. A platform can adopt it and stop there. The phases below extend it — each a separate decision, taken only if the prior phase earns it.

Phase 2 — Per-work provenance (the registry extends to individual works)

Phase 2 extends the integration so individual artists can fingerprint and anchor specific works, not just inherit the platform's policy-level opt-out. This is the first rung where the individual creator appears. It is the same integration and the same anchoring pipeline Phase 1 runs on — the per-creator surface it opens is delivered under Akaeon's creator brand, Stelais.

Fingerprinting happens inline in the platform's existing upload flow:

  1. The artist uploads a work — the platform's UX continues unchanged.
  2. The upload triggers an asynchronous fingerprint job.
  3. The resulting provenance record links back to the work's detail page.

The artist never leaves the platform, and the platform never has to rebuild its upload experience around the integration.

Working pricing assumption

The platform covers a per-creator monthly fingerprint quota as part of the integration (specific quota to be defined jointly). Artists upgrade to a Stelais subscription — the creator-side plan on the same registry — for higher volumes or to access the Phase 3 enforcement features.

This gives the platform a tangible creator benefit to market.

Working portability commitment

During the 12-month period following Phase 2 launch, Phase 2 creator onboarding is platform-mediated rather than direct: Akaeon commits to routing the platform's artists through the platform's product surface during this period.

Phase 3 — Enforcement and dashboard (the creator surface, fully opened)

Phase 3 turns provenance from a passive record into an active defense: the platform's artists gain the registry's full creator surface — the Stelais dashboard — for:

  • Managing their proof portfolio.
  • Triggering DMCA takedowns against infringing use.
  • Viewing verification activity on their records.
  • Configuring identity portability across integrated platforms.

Working architecture

Self-service DMCA workflow in lower Stelais subscription tiers; partial-managed and fully-managed takedown service in higher tiers and enterprise. Specific tier definitions and pricing to be defined jointly — when Phase 2 demonstrates that artist-level adoption justifies the operational investment.

What the creator-surface tooling does for the platform

The Phase 2–3 mechanisms read as creator features, but each one compounds into a platform-level defense:

  • Perceptual fingerprinting extends the opt-out past your borders. The Phase 1 domain opt-out covers content fetched from your domain — but scraped works circulate re-encoded, cropped, and re-posted, where an exact hash no longer matches. A perceptual fingerprint matches the content itself, so a work registered from your platform stays identifiable — and attributable to its anchored declaration — wherever the copy travels.

  • Watermarking survives what strips metadata. An imperceptible watermark embedded in the pixels carries an identifier that resolves back to the work's registry record. Metadata-based provenance (C2PA manifests, EXIF) is removed by most re-hosting and re-encoding pipelines; a pixel-domain watermark isn't. Together the two mean "this file appeared in a training corpus" can be traced back to this work, this creator, this platform, this anchored opt-out, this date.

  • The combination raises the cost of scraping you. A catalog known to be fingerprinted, watermarked, and Arweave-anchored is a catalog on which training violations are provable rather than deniable — the records predate any cutoff dispute, and identification survives laundering through re-encoding. That changes a lab's calculus about ingesting your corpus at all, and it is a protection every creator on the platform inherits whether or not they ever open a dashboard.

  • Creator trust is the platform's dividend. For communities that formed around AI-training concerns, per-work provenance and enforcement is a retention and acquisition feature the platform markets as its own — delivered inside your upload flow, on the registry you already integrated in Phase 1.

Phase progression principles

Each phase is a separate decision. Phase 1 does not commit the platform to Phase 2. Phase 2 does not commit it to Phase 3. The ladder exists to show the trajectory, not to bundle obligations.

Each phase is jointly scoped. Phase 2 and Phase 3 specifications are negotiated at their respective entry points, based on observed performance and aligned strategic intent.

Each phase preserves portability. Across all phases, the architectural commitment to creator-owned identity and Arweave-anchored records means no integration creates lock-in beyond the value the integration itself provides — the records live on the same substrate whether the creator reaches them through the platform or directly.