AURA is an open, neutral and interoperable technical specification providing verifiable proof of origin, integrity and rights reservation for digital and creative content in the context of AI systems. AURA addresses a structural gap between legal obligations and technical practice: while transparency, provenance and copyright requirements increasingly exist (AI Act, copyright law, TDM rights reservation), no shared, verifiable and neutral technical layer currently allows these requirements to be documented and independently checked at scale. AURA is a declarative evidence layer. It establishes technical facts integrity of the exact bytes, issuer/key binding, issuer-declared issuance time, rights reservation signals that can be verified independently, offline, without an account and without any proprietary service. What AURA establishes • Content origin and intent, explicitly documented • Cryptographically signed manifests (JSON-LD, Ed25519) • Independent auditability over time • Interoperability with existing identifiers and sector infrastructures (ISRC, ISWC, DDEX, C2PA, ISCC) What AURA does not establish AURA does not determine ownership, authorship, originality or legal entitlement. A signature proves control of a key, not the legal authority of the declarant. AURA does not by itself satisfy any regulatory obligation, and the absence of an AURA manifest never means permission, licence or waiver. Design boundaries • Open specification under Apache 2.0, no proprietary control • No watermarking, fingerprinting, DRM, content recognition, usage monitoring or platform control mechanisms • No mandatory civil identity, no mandatory verification logging • Verification can be performed fully locally, without telemetry • Compatible with human-created, AI-generated and hybrid content Project status • Published specification v1.2.1 — DOI 10.5281/zenodo.22071523 • Independent verifier AURA-VERIFIER v1.1.0 — DOI 10.5281/zenodo.22069698 • Complete neutral example, verifiable without any proprietary component • Public issuer registry and revocation material available independently • Governance designed to evolve toward a multi-stakeholder model Relevance AURA is positioned as a candidate open building block for trusted provenance documentation, cross-border interoperability across cultural, media and AI ecosystems, and public-interest technical capacity building. Open to collaboration with public institutions, research organisations, collective management organisations, standardisation bodies and content ecosystem stakeholders. Relationship with implementations AUTHENTICA is one reference implementation supporting AURA. It is not the object of funding, but a technical vehicle used to test and demonstrate AURA concepts in practice.