Sovereign: A Local Architecture for Creator IP Protection

Defensive publication establishing prior art for Sovereign, a local-first architecture designed to protect digital intellectual property by establishing cryptographic identity, artifact lineage, and verifiable authorship proof without reliance on centralized services or cloud infrastructure.

Version 4.2 adds alignment documentation with the AIP-7 agentgovernance/v1 open standard, establishing that Sovereign's append-only hash-chained provenance log independently implements and predates the core audit-event primitive formalized in AIP-7. Brand updated to Alterna Axiom Labs.

All v4.0 elements remain: quantum-resilient SHA3-256 fingerprinting, single deterministic provenance engine, frequency-domain DCT watermarking, vault capacity enforcement, offline HMAC-SHA256 licensing, C2PA-aligned proof bundle mapping, portable cold-storage deployment, and self-contained Python verification.

This publication includes 21 prior-art claims covering the complete system architecture and is intended to prevent future patent claims covering the same or substantially similar system design.