Abstract
This disclosure describes a way for publishers, such as news organizations, public bodies and archives, to give the public a verifiable account of where a published item came from and what has happened to it since. Each item, such as an article, photograph, video or dataset, carries a chain of custody: a sequence of signed links from capture, recorded by a certified sensor or device, through each editing step, recorded by certified tools and by identified editors or AI systems acting under their own credentials, to publication by an identified publisher. Each link names who or what acted, what was changed and the hashes before and after, so that anyone can check that the published item descends from the captured original without undisclosed changes. Publications are registered in a public, append-only log. When a publisher corrects or retracts an item, the correction is signed and logged, and every copy of the item that carries its identifier, wherever it has been republished, quoted or embedded, shows the correction when displayed by a conforming reader or platform, without the publisher having to contact each site. Public feeds and platforms that conform display live provenance beside each item: verified origin, the chain's completeness, any corrections, and whether AI systems took part in editing. Items whose chain is broken or absent are shown as such, without judgement of their truth.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Wang, Edward D. H., "SI Media™: A Verifiable Chain of Custody for Published Media from Capture through Editing to Publication, with Corrections that Follow Every Copy and Live Provenance Shown on Public Feeds", Technical Disclosure Commons, (October 20, 2026)
https://www.tdcommons.org/dpubs_series/12306