NexusCurate

Protecting Derivative Rights in the Age of Generative AI

When a generative AI model transforms a museum photograph into a narrated video, remixes an archival illustration into an immersive animation, or produces an entirely new creative work inspired by a historical collection — a critical question emerges: who owns what, and how do you prove it?

Traditional copyright frameworks were designed for a world where a human author creates a single work. Today, a single source asset can spawn hundreds of AI-generated derivatives in minutes — each one a potential rights event involving the original creator, the institution holding the source material, the AI model provider, and the commissioning organisation. Without a structured, machine-readable provenance chain, these relationships become invisible — and disputes become inevitable.

Why This Matters Now

The EU AI Act and the evolving regulatory landscape around generative AI are placing new obligations on organisations that deploy AI to produce creative content. Institutions must be able to demonstrate that AI-generated outputs respect the rights attached to their source material, that attribution is preserved through every transformation, and that licensing terms are enforced — not just documented, but <strong>computationally enforced</strong> through the production pipeline.

This is precisely what NexusCurate was built to solve. Every asset that enters the system — whether a Renaissance painting scan, a field recording, or a 3D archaeological model — receives a cryptographic identity anchored to a private blockchain. When generative AI creates a derivative, the new work is automatically linked to its parent assets with explicit, machine-readable rights expressed as smart contracts following ISO/IEC 21000-23. The result is an <strong>unbroken, tamper-proof chain of provenance</strong> from original source through every AI transformation to final published output

As AI-generated video, audio, and multimedia content becomes ubiquitous, the organisations that invest in provenance infrastructure now will be the ones that can scale creative AI with confidence — and the ones that regulators, partners, and audiences trust.

NexusCurate enables cultural institutions to embrace generative AI for new forms of creative interpretation and audience engagement while preserving an unbroken chain of attribution back to source. It provides a secure, standards-compliant pipeline for tracking the provenance, ownership and derivative rights of cultural heritage assets — including original artworks and AI-generated creative works derived from them.

Built within the SHIFT project, NexusCurate integrates ISO/IEC 21000 standards with blockchain provenance and GenAI creative workflows — giving museums, galleries, archives and libraries the confidence to explore AI-driven creativity without losing control of rights, attribution, or institutional trust.

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Key Features

• Cryptographic asset hashing for unique digital identification of every artefact
• Generative-AI workflows for creative reinterpretation — image-to-video, narrative, remix — with provenance preserved end-to-end
• Machine-readable smart contracts per ISO/IEC 21000-23 (Contract Expression Language)
• Media Value Chain Ontology alignment per ISO/IEC 21000-24
• Private Ethereum blockchain for tamper-resistant audit trail via SHIFTAssetRegistry.sol
• S3-compatible object storage (MinIO) for original and derivative assets
• CIDOC CRM and PROV-O alignment for cultural metadata and provenance interoperability
• Django + Web3.py REST API for seamless institutional integration

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Application Areas

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Technical Specification

Storage	MinIO (S3-compatible) for off-chain artefacts and contracts
Standards	ISO/IEC 21000-23:2018 (CEL), ISO/IEC 21000-24:2022 (MVCO), CIDOC CRM, PROV-O
Blockchain	Private Ethereum (geth) network with SHIFTAssetRegistry.sol smart contract
Backend	Python / Django framework with Web3.py blockchain bridge
Generative AI	Image-to-video, narrative and remix workflows with end-to-end provenance binding
Interfaces	REST APIs for ingestion, query, contract issuance and audit retrieval
Cluster	Cluster 2 — Culture, Creativity & Inclusive Society

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How It Works

Asset Registration & Hashing

When a cultural asset enters NexusCurate — whether a high-resolution scan of a painting, a 3D model of a sculpture, or an archival photograph — it is cryptographically hashed to produce a unique digital fingerprint. This hash, along with metadata aligned to CIDOC CRM and PROV-O standards, is recorded on the private Ethereum blockchain. The original asset is stored in MinIO with its hash as the immutable link between the file and its on-chain record.

Provenance-Preserving GenAI

NexusCurate’s generative AI workflows allow institutions to create derivative works — video interpretations of paintings, narrative explorations of archival material, creative remixes for exhibitions — while maintaining an unbroken provenance chain. Every AI-generated output is linked back to its source assets, the model and parameters used, and the institutional approval that authorised the creation. The derivative is registered on-chain as a new asset with explicit parent-child relationships.

Smart Contracts & Rights

Rights and licensing terms are expressed as machine-readable smart contracts following ISO/IEC 21000-23 (Contract Expression Language). When an institution shares an asset or derivative with another organisation, the contract governs permitted uses, attribution requirements, and commercial terms — all enforced programmatically rather than through manual agreements. The Media Value Chain Ontology (ISO/IEC 21000-24) provides the semantic framework for describing roles, actions, and value flows across the asset lifecycle.

Audit & Compliance

Every transaction — registration, transfer, derivative creation, rights query — is immutably recorded on the blockchain. Institutions can retrieve a complete audit trail for any asset at any time, demonstrating provenance, chain of custody, and compliance with licensing terms. This is critical for participation in EU Data Spaces for Cultural Heritage and for demonstrating AI Act compliance when generative AI is used in public-facing cultural contexts.

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Heritage & Lineage

NexusCurate was developed by VTG within the SHIFT project, integrating ISO/IEC 21000 standards with blockchain provenance and GenAI creative workflows for the cultural heritage sector. The platform demonstrates how institutions can adopt generative AI responsibly — with full rights management, attribution integrity, and auditable compliance throughout the creative process.

Target Calls: Horizon Europe Cluster 2 (Culture, Creativity and Inclusive Society) — cultural heritage digitisation, GenAI for cultural sectors, EU Data Spaces for Cultural Heritage, AI Act compliance for creative AI, GLAM-sector AI governance.