Clearance Manifest
A portable, fail-closed, byte-exact rights-clearance artifact that travels with a creative work, so that "this is cleared to use, and here is exactly why" is something a machine can carry and check.
The Clearance Manifest is an open standard for a rights-clearance artifact that travels with a creative work. It records, in a portable and checkable form, that a work is cleared for use, on what basis, and with what integrity guarantee. It is fail-closed by design: if the clearance cannot be established, the manifest does not assert it.
Compose, do not reinvent
The design principle is to lean on standards that already exist rather than invent new ones. Creative Commons and RightsStatements.org carry the rights status. schema.org and Dublin Core carry the description and provenance. W3C PROV records the determination event, the who, when, and how of the clearance decision. SHA-256 and C2PA handle integrity and signing. The manifest is the thin layer that binds these into one byte-exact artifact. No new cryptography, no new rights vocabulary.
Why it exists
Open-access culture is enormous and growing, but "is this actually free to use, and can I prove it" is still answered by hand, per image, per project. A clearance that a machine can emit, carry, and verify turns that repeated manual judgement into something portable. It is the same instinct as the preflight work: make the reasoning explicit and checkable, before it matters, rather than trusting an assurance after the fact.
Published, and in use
The standard is not theoretical. The open-museum-mcp engine emits a Clearance Manifest alongside every artwork it returns, and it is the rights layer the print side of open-museum.art is built on. It is also published in the open. The v0.1 specification, with its prose, rule registry, JSON Schemas, JSON-LD context, and governance, is live at openclearance.org/v0.1 and developed at github.com/openclearance/openclearance. The engine emits the manifest; the canonical spec now lives at openclearance.org.