A HAND ID is a persistent, globally resolvable Digital Object Identifier (DOI) for a notable public figure — an athlete, actor, musician, director, creator, or other quantifiably notable person in the Cultural Industries. It is issued by HAND — one of only 12 authorized DOI Registration Agencies in the world — under the governance of the DOI Foundation and ISO 26324:2025.

Eligibility is determined by Citation-Backed Notability™ — HAND's proprietary methodology for verifying genuine, enduring significance through independent, verifiable citations from reputable sources. No self-reported credentials, no follower counts, no gamed metrics. A multiplicity of citations from a community of reputable sources — with no single arbiter and no single point of failure.

No. A HAND ID is permanent. It is issued once and remains resolvable forever — through career changes, platform migrations, organizational changes, and even after death. The DOI Foundation's infrastructure, in operation since 1997 with more than 3.5 billion resolutions per month across all Registration Agencies, guarantees this persistence at the technical and organizational level.

Nobody "owns" a HAND ID in the traditional sense. A HAND ID belongs to the public record of a person's notability — not to the studio that employs them, the platform that hosts them, or the representative who registers them. It is purely functional, carrying no implication of ownership or contractual relationship. It persists regardless of any change in who manages the talent's career.

HAND is not itself an ISO standard, but it is a Registration Agency of the DOI Foundation — the governance body for ISO 26324:2025. All HAND IDs are issued under this ISO standard, which governs syntax, persistence, and resolution infrastructure. ISO 26324:2025 ↗

EIDR and HAND are sibling DOI Registration Agencies — both authorized by the DOI Foundation, both operating on the same Handle System infrastructure. EIDR identifies content (films, TV shows, edits). HAND identifies talent (the people who create that content). A production record can carry both. They are complementary, not competing — HAND's success deepens the value of EIDR, and vice versa. That alignment is structural, not incidental: Raymond Drewry, Co-Founder of EIDR and Principal Scientist at MovieLabs, is a founding Strategic Advisor to HAND.

No. HAND is a registry, not a rights management system. The metadata associated with a HAND ID is functional in nature — sufficient to identify and disambiguate a person, nothing more. HAND does not collect commercially sensitive rights data, contract terms, compensation, or ownership information. Think of it as the identifier that your rights management system references — not a replacement for it.

HAND issues Type 02: Licensed Human Likeness IDs — covering every authorized permutation of a person's likeness, from AI-generated synthetic voice and virtual avatars to NIL endorsements, holographic appearances, and uses not yet imagined. The best practice is concurrent registration: when a new likeness object is created with consent, a HAND ID is issued at that same moment — so the act of creation and the act of licensing are co-recorded in a single provenance event. Retroactive registration is fully supported for likenesses already in use, bringing existing deployments into the same auditable graph. In both cases, the Type 02 ID is permanently linked to its Type 01 Human Identity source, creating a traversable chain of custody to the NIL rights holder — one hop, any system, any time. This structure is critical for compliance with California AB 1836, AB 2602, the NO FAKES Act, and emerging AI likeness legislation globally.

Yes. The HAND registry is publicly searchable — anyone can look up a HAND ID or search by name at registry.hand-id.org ↗. Programmatic API access for bulk resolution and supply-chain integration is available to HAND members. Lookup is always free.

No — HAND is not a crowdsourced database. Unlike Wikidata, Wikipedia, or IMDb, no one edits HAND records directly: not talent, not fans, and not members. A HAND record holds only basic public disambiguation data drawn from independent sources. To change public information, it has to change at those sources — including Wikidata, where HAND IDs are linked through property P14750, under Wikidata’s own editing rules — and HAND picks those changes up. Your HAND ID itself is yours: it is never sold, transferred, or locked against the person it identifies.

Not directly — and you don’t need to. HAND IDs are issued from independent, verifiable public record (Citation-Backed Notability™), not self-submission, and HAND does not offer individual registration or consumer support. The path in runs through the organizations that already represent talent: ask your agency, management company, guild, union, or league about HAND. If your company manages or represents talent, we want to talk to you.

HAND membership provides: unlimited HAND ID resolution via API, bulk catalog mapping support, participation in HAND working groups and standards governance, access to technical documentation and SDKs, free training sessions, and inclusion in the HAND member roster. Membership tiers scale to organization size. Learn about membership →

HAND is a Delaware non-stock nonprofit C corporation, currently applying for IRS 501(c)(6) trade association status. It is governed by an independent board, currently chaired by Renard T. Jenkins (Founder, I2A2 Technologies; President, HPA; Past President, SMPTE), with Strategic Advisors including Raymond Drewry (Co-Founder, EIDR; Principal Scientist, MovieLabs) and Scott Perry (C2PA Conformance Lead, CAWG Co-Chair). No single commercial interest controls it.

Yes — and this is a strength, not a risk. The DOI Foundation mandates that if any Registration Agency ceases operations, its DOI names are "homed" in another RA, ensuring no DOI name is ever lost. The Handle System's global root infrastructure has operated continuously since 1997. HAND adds its own redundant infrastructure — replication servers, secondary sites, and mirrored databases — on top of this already resilient foundation.

This is one of the most common misconceptions about the DOI system — and it matters for understanding what HAND is. The word “digital” in Digital Object Identifier refers to the identifier itself, not the object being identified. A DOI is a digital identifier of an object — not an identifier of a digital object.

The DOI Foundation states this plainly on doi.org: “A DOI name is a digital identifier of an object, any object — physical, digital, or abstract.” DOI names identify physical books, physical people, physical locations, abstract licenses, and digital files with exactly equal validity. The identifier is digital. The object is whatever it is.

For HAND, this means a HAND ID identifies a person — a legal, natural human being — regardless of whether they appear in digital or physical contexts. An athlete on a physical field, an actor in a physical theatre, a musician performing live — all equally identified by their HAND ID. The fact that AI-generated likenesses and Licensed Human Likenesses are among HAND’s most urgent use cases does not limit HAND to the digital world. It is the identifier that is digital. The talent is human.

Both appear in circulation, but the Foundation itself consistently uses The DOI Foundation in its own communications — on doi.org, in its official statements, and in its ISO registration authority capacity. The formal legal name is the International DOI Foundation, Inc., which is how it appears in some external references including Wikipedia. For everyday reference and in standards contexts, The DOI Foundation is how the organization styles itself. HAND follows that convention.

Yes — on both counts, and the lineage goes back further than most people realize.

A HAND ID is a DOI, and the DOI has been expressible as a Uniform Resource Identifier since its inception. The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) — the foundational metadata standard for the web, established 1995 — explicitly lists the DOI alongside ISBN and URN as the canonical examples of conforming identification systems for its dc:identifier element. That specification has been publicly documented since the late 1990s.

DOIs are expressible as URNs using the doi: URI scheme and are fully compatible with the Handle System's own URI resolution infrastructure. The DOI's internet-native credentials are not a recent addition — they are structural, dating to the Handle System's development at CNRI by Dr. Robert E. Kahn (1994) and the DOI Foundation's incorporation (1997).

In practical terms: a HAND ID can appear in any system that accepts a URI, a URN, a DOI, or a Dublin Core dc:identifier value — including C2PA Content Credentials manifests, CAWG identity assertions, linked data graphs, and any metadata standard built on Dublin Core. It resolves globally via the same Handle System infrastructure that has underpinned the internet’s object identifier resolution layer since 1997.