HAND (Human & Digital) is launching a Delaware Public Benefit Corporation (applying for 501(c)6 trade association status) to oversee the governance and growth of the HAND Talent ID.
HAND is the first global B2B Talent ID registry platform for the efficient discoverability, royalty collection and revenue tracking of notable legal and natural persons.
It streamlines licensing and traceability of consent-based digital replicas and provides authentication of fictional characters in the media supply-chain.
Working with its industry partners, the registry has currently qualified nearly 120,000 globally unique and freely-resolvable talent identifiers from a data lake of more than 4.4million unique talent IDs for real, replica-based, and fictional entertainment and sports talent.
These talent identifiers are being used today at https://registry.handidentity.com.
The new trade association, HAND – The Universal Talent Identifier, is focused on establishing HAND as an industry standard for talent ID registration and is issuing a call to cultural industry and technology leaders to join a major US talent agency, already working with HAND, as charter members.
HAND’s existing business, Human & Digital, Inc., will continue to operate as a for-profit platform, providing professional data transformation services, business intelligence and predictive analytics tools to support the registry and the industry more broadly.
“We’re at the start of a new era of human agency,” said Will Kreth, founder and CEO of HAND. “Deepfakes are clearly a threat, but even before the introduction of Gen AI – the informed consent licensing of notable human NILV as 3D replicas was a multi-billion-dollar industry in AAA Sports Video Games and in live performances, such as ABBA Voyage.”
“By establishing HAND as a non-profit trade association now,” Kreth continued, “we can bring many more industry partners together to scale HAND’s interoperable and standardized automation of the identification of both notable talent and their consent-based digital replicas. And with our participation in respected industry organizations such as the Coalition for Content Provenance & Authenticity (C2PA), and the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC), adoption of our public Talent ID standard is poised to accelerate. We look forward to many more companies joining us in this timely and essential effort.”
Like a “tracking beacon” for talent, HAND automates the identification, verification, provenance, and authenticity of talent-related assets in audio/visual works and virtual environments to help maintain integrity and version control of authorized likenesses in monetizable content. Sony Pictures Entertainment, Fabric Data/BB Media, and AFI (American Film Institute) are among 12 international companies who are API/Beta partners testing and deploying HAND’s Talent IDs.
