Keep Your Art Yours: Advanced Watermarking and Authorship Verification Tools

As the late David Bowie sang, “Ch-ch-ch-changes,” and with AI rapidly reshaping the creative landscape, now is the time for artists to confront these shifts head-on. There may be no foolproof method for protecting image assets, but you can certainly strengthen verification and establish a clear stamp of authorship.

Tools like Yuify, Proofmark, and Digimarc are emerging as powerful allies in helping creators keep their art truly theirs and reduce the risk of theft.

• Yuify — Uses an invisible micromark linked to a blockchain record to prove authorship and manage licensing. Keep in mind that the mark can be lost through screenshots or heavy compression, but it still provides reliable verification of authorship for the original files.

• Proofmark — Combines a visible watermark with an invisible forensic ID that remains detectable even if the visible mark is removed, offering strong durability across edits and reposts. You can verify ownership via their verification tool, and it supports reverse-image searches across Google, Bing, and Yandex to help you track where your content is being used.

• Digimarc — Enterprise-grade forensic watermarking (at the pixel-pattern level) is designed to survive resizing, color shifts, printing, and aggressive online manipulation. This is the most resilient of the options, though it requires a budget for ongoing subscription services.

The landscape of creative authorship, verification, and the boundaries of “fair use” is a global hot topic as governments grapple with the implications of AI-driven data scraping for machine learning.

Australia’s Labor government recently confirmed it will not introduce a “text and data mining” (TDM) exception in the Copyright Act. In practical terms, this means AI developers must obtain permission or licensing before using copyright-protected works as training data.

It’s also important to note that under current Australian Copyright Law, a work must have a human author who contributes “independent intellectual effort” to qualify for protection. This stance is a significant win for creators, as it prevents AI companies from freely mining creative work.

As a result, having strong proofs of ownership, such as watermarks and authorship verification, has become more important than ever.

Future-proof your creativity.

Look forward, think forward, move forward.