What is AuthorMark and C2PA content credentials?
What is AuthorMark and C2PA content credentials?
Plain English. A little technical where it matters. No marketing adjectives.
The one-sentence version
AuthorMark is BananaRat Studio's implementation of two independent cryptographic signatures — a C2PA content credential and an AudioSeal neural watermark — embedded in every MP3 you make, so the origin and authorship of the file can be verified independently of us.
What C2PA content credentials are
C2PA (Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity) is an open technical standard for attaching cryptographically signed provenance metadata to media files. A C2PA manifest records: who made the file, what tools were used, when it was created, and whether the file has been modified since signing. The manifest is embedded in the file itself — not in a separate database — so it travels with the MP3 when you share or distribute it.
The C2PA spec is maintained by Adobe, Microsoft, the BBC, and others. C2PA credentials are readable by any conforming verifier, including Adobe Content Authenticity, Truepic, and open-source tools like c2pa-rs. You do not need to use BananaRat Studio's platform to verify a file — anyone can read the credential independently. Until our certificate is listed publicly, verifiers will also show the signer as unrecognised.
What AudioSeal is
AudioSeal is a neural watermarking technique developed by Meta Research. It embeds a signal in the audio waveform that is inaudible under normal listening conditions but detectable by a trained detector. AudioSeal provides a machine-detectable AI-origin marker that survives re-encoding to different bitrates and formats, loudness normalisation, and sample-rate conversion — though reading it back requires decoding at the rate it was embedded at. It operates independently of the file container, so it works even if the C2PA manifest is stripped.
What AuthorMark records about your song
The C2PA manifest embedded by AuthorMark records:
- The platform that generated the content (BananaRat Studio)
- Our own record of when the song was made — note this is our timestamp, not a third party’s
- A hash of the audio content at signing time (detects modification)
- A "Trainer-Data-Miner" assertion consistent with the CAWG specification — declaring that the file's use in AI training datasets is not authorized by the platform
AuthorMark does not record your name, account ID, or any personally identifying information in the C2PA manifest. The manifest identifies the platform, not the individual user. Your authorship is documented separately in the Witness Log and Evidence Bundle.
What AuthorMark does not do
AuthorMark is not a lock on the file. It does not prevent you from sharing, selling, or distributing your songs. It does not prevent playback outside our platform. It is a provenance record — evidence of origin, not a restriction on use.
No platform license
The C2PA manifest identifying BananaRat Studio as the generation platform does not constitute a license grant from us. We make no copyright claim in the content. The manifest is a factual record, not an assertion of ownership.
How to verify a file
To verify AuthorMark on a file you have, visit contentcredentials.org/verify and upload the MP3. The C2PA manifest will be displayed, including the generation assertion. It will also show the signer as unrecognised, because our certificate is not yet in the public trust lists. There is no signing timestamp: our manifests do not currently carry one. Alternatively, use the open-source c2pa-rs command-line tool or any C2PA-compatible application.