hand-id.org · Nonprofit Trade Association · 501(c)(6) Applying

Who You Are.
What You’ve Done.
And Who Says So.

HAND is the first persistent, globally resolvable identifier for athletes, actors, creators, and every notable public figure in the Cultural Industries. One ID. Forever. Follows the person — not the team, not the studio, not the platform. Built on the DOI^® Foundation. Governed by a nonprofit. Controlled by nobody — which is exactly why everybody can trust it.

🏆 Sports? Your NIL & CBA infrastructure problem — solved.

🎬 Entertainment? The talent identity gap EIDR didn’t cover — covered.

Join HAND → Find a HAND ID The Standard →

One of only 12 DOI Registration Agencies in the world

The same ISO standard (ISO 26324:2025) behind academic publishing, scientific research, and global content identification — now, for the first time, for human talent.

Three representations of a performer — photorealistic, digital replica, and animated character — illustrating the HAND identity framework for talent across Cultural Industries

Why Now

The window is open.
It won’t stay open.

Five hundred thousand NCAA D1 athletes are now running businesses — endorsements, licensing deals, NIL contracts — with no portable, verifiable identity infrastructure underneath them. Player associations are negotiating CBAs right now that will define how AI likenesses are governed for the next decade. Legislators have already moved. The organizations that have neutral, machine-readable talent identification in their workflows before 2026’s contract cycles close will be structurally ahead of those that don’t. This isn’t a prediction. It’s already happening.

FORCE 01 — Sports

The NIL Era Has No Infrastructure

The NCAA’s NIL era created 500,000+ new individual rights-holders overnight. Every D1 athlete is now a small business. Every compliance department is drowning. Transfer portal, endorsement deals, multi-platform licensing, AI likeness protections — all of it requires verifiable, portable identity that doesn’t live in a spreadsheet and doesn’t expire when a player changes schools or turns pro. HAND is the answer that doesn’t take sides — neutral infrastructure every stakeholder can use.

500K+ NCAA D1 Athletes NIL Compliance Transfer Portal MLBPA / MLB CBA NFL · NBA · NHL PAs

FORCE 02 — Legislative

The Laws Are Already Signed

California AB 1836 and AB 2602 create statutory liability for unauthorized AI likenesses and AI-generated performances — in the state where most major studios and sports leagues are headquartered. NY S.8420-A and S.8391 extend those protections. The federal NO FAKES Act has bipartisan momentum. CPRA exposure for SSN-based talent identification is an active, unresolved legal risk today. This is not anticipated regulation — these are active laws creating active liability right now.

CA AB 1836 CA AB 2602 NY S.8420-A NO FAKES Act CPRA

FORCE 03 — AI Provenance

AI Made This Urgent. HAND Makes It Solvable.

Synthetic media, AI-generated likenesses, and digital replicas have made talent identification a trust crisis across sports and entertainment alike. C2PA can attest the chain of custody of a file. HAND attests who is in it. Provenance without resolution is a label on an empty box. HAND’s Type 02 Digital Replica IDs create an auditable consent chain linking every AI likeness back to a verified, consenting person — the infrastructure every AI governance policy assumes exists but hasn’t. Until now.

C2PA Member CAWG Member Type 02 Consent Chain SAG-AFTRA / AMPTP

For the Sports World Specifically

The jersey number is the closest thing sports has ever had to a persistent identifier.
HAND is what comes next.

A jersey number belongs to the team. It gets retired, reassigned, retired again. It doesn’t follow the athlete through a trade, a signing, or a pivot to broadcasting. HAND IDs follow the person — from D1 scholarship to first professional contract to broadcast career to legacy licensing — across every system, every partner, every platform.

“A jersey number belongs to the team. A HAND ID belongs to the athlete. Forever. It never expires.”

🎓 NCAA D1 Compliance Departments

500K+ athletes. NIL deals. Transfer portal. AI likeness risk. One portable, neutral ID handles all of it — and lives with the athlete, not the school.

🏆 Professional Leagues & Player Associations

CBA negotiations need neutral infrastructure. HAND isn’t owned by the league or the union. That structural fact is exactly why both sides can adopt it without conceding anything.

📷 Sports Media & Broadcast Rights

Streaming rights deals multiply platforms. Every new platform is a new name-matching problem. HAND solves all of them at once, permanently, with a single resolvable ID.

The Registry Is Already Running

The standard is operating
at scale in your industry.

HAND didn’t launch into a vacuum. These registrations happened ahead of industry calendars — demonstrating that the registry can operate at scale, proactively, before the market demanded it. The question isn’t whether HAND IDs will be part of your industry’s workflow. They already are.

Sports — Baseball

September 2025

2025 MLB First Round Draft Class

The entire 2025 MLB First Round Draft Class received HAND IDs — providing each rising star with a permanent, resolvable identifier ahead of their professional careers, before their first at-bat, before their first endorsement deal.

Read press release →

Sports — Basketball

September 2025

2025 NBA Draft Class

The entire 2025 NBA Draft Class received HAND IDs — a forever ID protecting against deepfakes and streamlining NIL licensing from the first day of their professional lives. Issued proactively, not retroactively.

Read press release →

Entertainment

September 2025

2025 Primetime Emmy Nominees

All 2025 Primetime Emmy Nominees in top acting categories received HAND IDs — bringing the standard to the heart of the entertainment industry’s annual recognition calendar, in alignment with the industry’s own rhythm.

Read press release →

What is HAND?

A forever ID for every
notable public figure.

HAND issues persistent, unique, globally resolvable DOI-based identifiers for quantifiably notable legal-entity humans, their connected Digital Replicas, and Fictional Characters in the Cultural Industries. Every HAND ID is sourced from verifiable, independent citations — not self-reported claims, follower counts, or gamed metrics.

⬡

Persistent — no expiration date

A HAND ID issued today remains resolvable forever. It follows talent across careers, platforms, and formats — and survives platform shutdowns, organizational changes, and data migrations.

⭈

Globally unique and freely resolvable

Every HAND ID resolves via the DOI Foundation’s global handle system — the infrastructure built by Dr. Robert E. Kahn, co-inventor of TCP/IP, recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. 3 billion resolutions per month.

⭗

Three ID types — the full talent lifecycle

Type 01: Legal Persons. Type 02: Connected Digital Replicas (consent-chained to Type 01). Type 03: Fictional Characters. Every dimension of talent identity, covered.

⬜

Interoperable with EIDR — sibling standards

EIDR identifies content. HAND identifies talent. Both are DOI Registration Agencies on the same Handle System. A production record can carry both. They are complementary, not competing.

Three Object Types

TYPE 01

🧑 Legal & Natural Persons

10.23/B77C-A6A1-D3E8-1E13-D6C7

Athletes, actors, directors, musicians, creators. Citation-Backed Notability™ verified.

TYPE 02

🤖 Connected Digital Replicas

10.23/F72B-0103-B361-05F9-3Z71

AI likenesses & synthetic voice models. Always linked to Type 01 — auditable consent chain.

TYPE 03

🎭 Fictional Characters

10.23/5F45-8D85-5C84-E4AD

IP-protected characters from film, TV, gaming. Rights tracking & licensing automation.

Search the HAND Registry → Lookup is always free

Citation-Backed Notability™

Not fame. Not followers.
Verified notability.

Andy Warhol said everyone would be famous for 15 minutes. In a world of viral moments and algorithmic amplification, fame is no longer a reliable proxy for notability. Citation-Backed Notability™ is HAND’s rigorous, reputational methodology for quantifying genuine, enduring significance — the threshold that makes a HAND ID legally, commercially, and professionally meaningful. Only HAND has it.

◯

No single point of failure

Eligibility is determined by a multiplicity of independent citations — not any single arbiter, authority, or algorithm.

◈

No self-reported credentials

No follower counts, no purchased verifications, no self-submitted claims. Every record is sourced from verifiable, reputable third-party citations.

◇

Legally meaningful threshold

The cumulative weight of verifiable citations provides the most durable foundation for legally protected NIL rights in an AI-generated likeness world.

◆

Proprietary to HAND

Citation-Backed Notability™ is a HAND trademark. It is the methodology that makes HAND IDs defensible where it matters — in courts, in contracts, in compliance workflows.

™ Citation-Backed Notability™ — Only HAND Has It

Governed By Industry Veterans

The people who built the standards
the industry already runs on.

HAND’s nonprofit board is not assembled from generalists. Every member brings specific, irreplaceable institutional lineage — from the bodies that created EIDR, C2PA, CAWG, and SMPTE. Due diligence will confirm every credential on this page in thirty seconds.

RTJ

Renard T. Jenkins

Chairman, Board of Directors

Past President, SMPTE. Thirty-plus years building bridges between creative communities, technology platforms, and global media standards. Named HAND’s first Board Chairman, January 2026.

The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers sets the technical standards for how content is made. Its former President now chairs HAND’s board.

Raymond Drewry

Board Member

Co-Founder, EIDR. Principal Scientist, MovieLabs. One of the architects of the standards infrastructure the entertainment industry runs on. The author of the 2019 MovieLabs white paper “Creating a Talent Identifier for the Entertainment Industry” — which called for exactly what HAND built.

EIDR Co-Founder sits on the board of HAND — the sibling DOI Registration Agency for talent. HAND’s success deepens EIDR’s value. He knows this.

Scott Perry

Board Member

C2PA Conformance Lead. CAWG Co-Chair. Sitting at the intersection of content authenticity and AI provenance — the exact standards bodies that make HAND IDs the talent-layer answer to AI-generated content.

The person who chairs the working group that sets C2PA conformance requirements is on HAND’s board. That is not a partnership. That is structural alignment.

      
      Strategic Advisors
    

Paul Jessop

Former CTO, IFPI & RIAA. Executive Director, US ISRC Agency. Co-author, ISNI (ISO 27729). Founder of DDEX. Among the first people Will Kreth brought into the HAND conversation. Published A Manifesto for Creator Identification and Protection (Oct. 2023) — a nine-point bill of rights for exactly the infrastructure HAND was already building.

David Hughes

Longtime media technology standards executive. RIAA and Sony Music background. Deep expertise in the identifier and rights management infrastructure that underpins the global music industry.

Wynne Kim

VP Data Policy & Standards, Human & Digital. Former Microsoft, Google, DoubleClick. Policy and standards fluency across global platforms — with two M&A exits and a startup exit.

Paul Jessop — Creator ID Manifesto

Before most people knew HAND existed, the person who helped build ISNI, ran the US ISRC Agency, and spent 13 years as CTO of IFPI wrote a public document calling for exactly this infrastructure. Read the Manifesto →

Who HAND Serves

Two industries.
One infrastructure problem.

Sports and entertainment look different from the outside. From the inside, they share the exact same broken plumbing: nobody can verifiably identify the talent that drives all the value — not across systems, not across organizations, not across careers. HAND fixes that. For both. Permanently. And the brands that write checks to both industries need the same fix.

Sports 🏆

Sports — Leagues, Associations & Colleges

500,000+ NCAA D1 athletes are now running NIL businesses with zero portable identity infrastructure. Professional player associations are negotiating CBAs that will define AI likeness rights for a decade. Leagues and rights holders are distributing athlete identity across more platforms than ever. HAND is the neutral, persistent identifier that works for the league, the union, the athlete, and the compliance department — because it’s controlled by none of them.

Why HAND? A jersey number belongs to the team. A HAND ID belongs to the athlete. Forever. It never expires.

Entertainment 🎬

Entertainment — Studios, Guilds & Platforms

Film studios, TV networks, music labels, streaming platforms, and the guilds that represent above-the-line talent have lived with the talent identity gap for decades. EIDR solved content. HAND solves talent. AI-generated likenesses, synthetic voice, and digital replicas have turned that gap into a legal and reputational liability. HAND’s auditable consent chain is the infrastructure every AI governance policy assumes exists — but didn’t, until now.

Why HAND? Content has had a global ID since 1997. The people who make it deserve one too.

Talent ⭐

Talent & Their Representatives

Athletes, artists, creators, and the agents, managers, and legal counsel who represent them. HAND IDs are registered through authorized representatives — the parties who already have the legal relationships to steward talent identity. The ID persists through every career transition, platform migration, and change of representation. Your HAND ID follows you. Nobody else owns it.

Why HAND? Participation in new media economies should happen by choice, not by default.

Brands 📈

Brands & Advertising

The brand writing the NIL check and the studio licensing the digital likeness have the same infrastructure problem: they need to know, verifiably, who they’re paying — and prove it, in court if necessary. Advertising is the economic engine that connects sports and entertainment. HAND is the identity layer that makes verified talent attribution possible at scale — across every campaign, every platform, every market.

Why HAND? Because “we thought we had the right person” is not a legal defense.

Industry Voices

They saw this coming.
Now you can too.

Not testimonials. Receipts. These are statements from the people who run content operations at major studios, build metadata infrastructure for Hollywood, and produce at the intersection of sports, IP, and emerging technology. Independent voices. Unprompted. All pointing at the same gap.

They should have another number to navigate and simplify their careers.

“There is a reason why there are numbers on every athlete. They should have another number to navigate and simplify their careers. We should consider the individual advantages if talented people could have more control over their work identities. I think HAND is a step in that direction.”

James Blevins

Chairman, HPA NET · Media Consultant & Producer (Lucasfilm) · Sports & Entertainment

True automation arrives when all key master data is machine readable.

“In my years working to optimize content supply-chains at Warner Bros. Pictures — we always thought it would be great if not only content, but talent — had a unique, global ID. True automation arrives when all key master data is machine readable. HAND Talent IDs will help push this vision into a reality.”

Susan Cheng

ex-EVP, Content Operations — Warner Bros. Pictures

This is a great move for the industry to get aligned around the value of global, persistent talent IDs.

“Fabric looks forward to HAND’s Talent ID standard arrival. We’ll definitely include them in our workflows via our orchestration layer. This is a great move for the industry to get aligned around the value of global, persistent talent IDs in media & entertainment overall.”

Rob Delf

CEO — Fabric · Cloud metadata orchestration for major Hollywood studios & global VOD platforms

Attribution of character in new virtual environments will be essential for IP rights holders to be compensated correctly.

“I am constantly reminded of the fact that attribution of character in new virtual environments will be essential for IP rights holders to be compensated correctly. What HAND is looking to do with a global Talent identifier could go a long way towards helping reduce friction and ambiguity in these emerging storytelling worlds.”

Chris Pfaff

CEO, Chris Pfaff Tech/Media · Co-Chair, VR/AR Association · Member, Producers Guild of America

Who You Are.What You’ve Done.And Who Says So.

The window is open.It won’t stay open.

The jersey number is the closest thing sports has ever had to a persistent identifier.HAND is what comes next.

The standard is operatingat scale in your industry.

A forever ID for everynotable public figure.

Not fame. Not followers.Verified notability.

The people who built the standardsthe industry already runs on.

Two industries.One infrastructure problem.

They saw this coming.Now you can too.

The standard is being built.The question is whether you’re inside it or outside it.

Who You Are.
What You’ve Done.
And Who Says So.

The window is open.
It won’t stay open.

The jersey number is the closest thing sports has ever had to a persistent identifier.
HAND is what comes next.

The standard is operating
at scale in your industry.

A forever ID for every
notable public figure.

Not fame. Not followers.
Verified notability.

The people who built the standards
the industry already runs on.

Two industries.
One infrastructure problem.

They saw this coming.
Now you can too.

The standard is being built.
The question is whether you’re inside it or outside it.