For most of history, a maker’s mark was enough. A potter pressed a seal into wet clay; a silversmith struck a hallmark into the metal. The mark said I made this, and anyone could read it.
Then the work went digital, and the readers changed. Today the first thing to encounter your photograph is not a curator or a customer — it is a content-recognition system, scanning millions of files an hour, deciding what gets distributed and what gets flagged. It does not read your caption. It reads the file.
If the machine can’t read your claim, it behaves as if you never made one.
That is the gap SIGIL exists to close. Not by inventing a new standard nobody honours, but by writing your ownership into the standards that already govern how images move: IPTC and XMP inside the file, schema.org on the page, a public record a crawler can fetch and verify.
We believe a creator should be able to publish anywhere and still carry their proof with them. We believe the timestamp on a claim should be honest even when the display date is cosmetic. We believe provenance should be checkable, not merely asserted.
You make the work. The least the infrastructure can do is make your ownership impossible to miss.