A HAND ID is issued on the basis of your publicly documented, independently verified significance. No employer registers you. No platform creates you. No studio owns you. Your HAND ID belongs to your notability — full stop.
Right now, every employer, every platform, every streaming service, and every agency has its own internal record for you — with its own ID, its own metadata, and its own terms. When you move on, those records don’t follow you. Your credits get lost. Your likeness gets misattributed. Your residuals get delayed because nobody can agree on who you are.
In the AI era, that fragmentation has consequences that go far beyond inconvenience. If your identity isn’t clearly yours, someone else can use it.
A HAND ID is purely functional — it carries no implication of ownership, employment, or contractual relationship. It identifies the public fact of your notability, not your relationship to any organization.
These are not pilots. These are production integrations — each one demonstrating a different dimension of what a universal talent identifier unlocks in the actual workflows of studios, platforms, and technology companies operating at scale.
HAND membership is how your organization participates in the governance, development, and adoption of the universal talent identifier standard. Corporate members don’t just use the standard — they help set it. That distinction matters when the standard becomes the industry default.
| Founding Board$50K / yr | Institutional$25K / yr | Associate$10K / yr | Startup$2.5K / yr | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Board seat & voting rights | ✓ | — | — | — |
| Authorized record attestation† | ✓ | ✓ | — | — |
| Standards committees | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | — |
| Working groups | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| API access & ID resolution | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Bulk catalog mapping & deduplication | ✓ | ✓ | — | — |
| Member roster listing | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
Only Founding Board members vote. Institutional and Associate members sit on committees and working groups, where the standard is actually shaped, without a vote on the board. Every membership includes an annual review with the HAND team. †By agreement; see below.
†Where a Founding Board or Institutional member holds the rights to a character, or a documented representation agreement covering talent, HAND can authorize it to attest and maintain those records — by agreement, and only while membership is active. A HAND ID itself is never sold, transferred, or locked against the person it identifies.
Additional details, terms, and conditions are available to HAND participant member companies as part of membership.
Every company that resolves HAND IDs makes the standard more useful for the next one — and makes your product interoperable with the studios, leagues, and platforms adopting the same IDs.
You get infrastructure you couldn’t build alone. The ecosystem gets one more system speaking the same language.
Additional details, terms, and conditions are available to HAND participant member companies as part of membership.
The value of a universal identifier standard is directly proportional to how many organizations adopt it. HAND is designed to be accessible to independent producers, boutique agencies, regional leagues, and small guilds — not just major studios and global platforms.
HAND is a Delaware non-stock nonprofit C corporation, currently applying for IRS 501(c)(6) trade association status. Not owned by any studio, platform, streaming service, guild, league, or player association. This structural neutrality is the feature — not an oversight.
“Like the internet’s DNS, HAND works precisely because no single organization controls it. That neutrality is not a talking point — it is the architectural reason every stakeholder can adopt it without surrendering anything to a competitor.”