# ACTA Music

> ACTA (Attestation of Creative Trajectory and Authorship) is an independent, artist-held cryptographic provenance protocol for music, designed for open implementation. It records evidence of how a musical work came into existence, inside the digital audio workstation, while the work is made, and exports disclosures to C2PA and DDEX. Evidence, not a verdict. ACTA is the short form of ACTA MUSIC™, a filed trademark.

Inventor and architect: Elodie Aishwarya P. Remoissenet, Barkley Labs (ORCID 0009-0004-6031-659X). Contact: hello@actamusic.org.
Audio contributor, ACTA Max for Live device: David Hachour, ColorSound Studio. Studio testing scheduled for September 2026.

## Research

- [ACTA Brief 03 — The Arranger's Share](https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22666343): a rights society's rulebook already defines the arranger, prices the contribution and adjudicates the threshold; the portion attributable to generative arrangement has no remuneration path. Proposes a mutualised levy paid by the user of the tool, and a pilot designed to disprove it. Research brief, open access, CC BY 4.0, English and French, 8 September 2026.
- [ACTA Brief 02 — The False Positive, Measured](https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22643005): when detection determines payment, the detector's error rate becomes a line in the royalty budget. Measured false positives, cost allocation, and an experimental pilot with a collective management organisation. Research brief, open access, CC BY 4.0, 8 September 2026.
- [ACTA Brief 01 — The Evidence Gap](https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22539107): when AI classification determines royalties, visibility and eligibility, what evidence does an artist have? Research brief, open access, CC BY 4.0, September 6, 2026.
- [Working paper WP-ACTA-01](https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21230054): Authorship Attests at the Gesture, Not the File. Restricted pre-release, access on request via Zenodo, August 25, 2026.
- Reference implementation: private pre-release, evaluation access on request. Ableton Live (Max for Live) integration entering private alpha; studio testing scheduled for September 2026.

## Writing

- [AI Music 01 — The Royalty Reservoir: Copyright Is a Legal Definition, Not a Label](https://medium.com/@labs-barkley/washington-didnt-abolish-copyright-it-moved-the-border-43bb4e638004): essay, September 7, 2026.

## Key definitions

- What ACTA records: a creation-time, longitudinal, tamper-evident record of the session, signed with a key only the artist holds, anchored with an RFC 3161 timestamp; no audio leaves the machine; the artist decides which portion is disclosed, to whom.
- What ACTA is not: a detector (infers from a finished file), a label (declares), or a post-hoc verification service (certifies after the fact that a person can demonstrate a relationship to a finished master). The master is an output; its hash identifies the file; the session is the witness.
- What distinguishes ACTA: a signature proves a key signed an asset; ACTA evidences how the work became that asset. Trajectory rather than point, gesture-level evidence, longitudinal continuity, creator-controlled selective disclosure.
- Relation to other layers: C2PA carries assertions bound to an asset; DDEX RIN structures and exchanges studio metadata; watermarks embed a signal where generators cooperate; ACTA produces the artist-held record those layers can carry or describe.

## Sources cited on the site

- Deezer Newsroom, AI music tops 50% of daily uploads, July 21, 2026: https://newsroom-deezer.com/2026/07/ai-music-exceeds-50-percent-daily-uploads-deezer/
- TIDAL, AI Policy (no royalties and no direct-to-fan sales for wholly AI-generated recordings), June 29, 2026: https://tidal.com/ai-policy

## Status (September 2026)

- Two French patent applications filed July 7 and July 9, 2026, before Article 50 of the EU AI Act became applicable (August 2, 2026). Trademark filed August 22, 2026.
- Pilots sought: one collective management organisation, one distributor, one additional DAW (ACTA Brief 01, section 6).