DPI for Authorship: AXM as Digital Public Infrastructure for Cultural IP and Programmable Consent

This whitepaper preview introduces AXM, a new form of Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) designed to protect cultural authorship, enable programmable consent, and modernize how cultural intellectual property (IP) is recognized and valued in the digital age. While billions of dollars are created each year from cultural memory—voices, images, designs, archives, stories, ancestral knowledge—communities rarely retain control, consent, or compensation. AI systems, digital platforms, and global creative markets all accelerate this imbalance, making authorship increasingly invisible and unenforceable.

AXM proposes a protocol-based solution that treats authorship as an identity layer and cultural works as verifiable digital assets, anchored through stable identifiers (“AXM IDs”), consent registries, and fallback licensing mechanisms. Modeled on global DPI exemplars such as Aadhaar, MOSIP, and GovStack, the AXM architecture introduces a public-good approach to cultural IP governance: traceable, enforceable, and interoperable across institutions.

Produced in partnership with the Miles College Cultural IP Research Hub, this paper highlights early AXM pilots involving cultural estates, academic research collaborations, and community-rooted institutions. It also frames cultural works as Cultural Sovereign Assets—yield-bearing, institutionally legible, and economically significant to both local communities and global markets.

This preview serves as an institutional abstract for the forthcoming full AXM whitepaper, which will expand on technical modules, governance frameworks, verifier onboarding, DPI interoperability, and the economic impact of programmable cultural IP. The work is relevant to policymakers, DPI architects, AI governance practitioners, cultural institutions, universities, archives, and creative-economy stakeholders seeking to build equitable digital futures.