Remilia's post-authorship ethos has exposed it to a vulnerability that's occasionally exploited: our rejection of authorship is towards an elimination of authorship—specifically, of outdated burdens of accreditation—but bad faith actors uncommitted to the same ideal have repeatedly tried to treat it as open season to claim authorship for themselves, exploiting our habit of obfuscating or intentionally misrepresenting credits.

It's of course, offensive as a shameless and direct counterthesis to our ideals, but more concerning: it is destructive of the work itself, distorting its fundamental context and the nature of our practice which defines the work through its ahistoricity. I don't mean the guys who pretend to be in Remilia to pick up girls, but e.g. we know of 4 separate pretenders to the throne who have simultaneously laying conflicting claims of "making Milady" in NYC alone; all easily refuted except they never dare share their claims in public, and the fact that none of them could actually Explain Milady to you.

If the distinction isn't clear: we say art should be stolen because art should be freed; but they steal art born free to cage it—reapplying authorship around themselves, usually to signal to institutions which do not understand, respect or acknowledge our distributed art practice, and demand a flag of authorship be planted onto it: conveniently, those of these hacks.

The Viral Public License identified exactly the same issue of "vampire licensing" in public domained copyleft licenses, allowing the BSD or MIT, for example, to be relicensed; and introduced the "viral clause" to aggressively enforces the same copyleft ethos into all future copies.

Post-authorship thus calls for a likewise defensive measure, to prevent the co-option by artists who do not commit the post-authorship ethos or institutions who do not respect the spirit and letter of the VPL.

Our solution is providing the detailed credits of the contributors to our projects and their roles, but hidden in SHA1 hashes whose full contents will be on time-delayed reveal 6-12 months.

This allows us to enjoy the playfully inaccurate attribution that characterizes nearly all our releases, the various persona-vessels and structural irreverence, with enough room for it to breathe and play out at launch, before letting the curtain be pulled back after its lived out its life, to ensure no exploitations to the canon can be performed in retrospect. In effect, this gives a lifespan to the living project, and allows a more retrospective detail to be shared on the inner workings, which often have as much as interesting ingenuinity in our creative process as the final release.

Anyone can then take the revealed credits and compare them against the SHA1 hash to confirm consistency. We can also reveal it early if needed, if someone tries to bumrush our canonization.

It's ironic we find ourselves in this situation, to be more detailed with our accreditation accounting than your average creditcuck; but it's really just a realistic burden of fame and money: vultures are circling.

And while I describe this as a solution to a post-authorship vulnerability, we actually already do have one, in our corporate-studio structure placing every participant on clear work-for-hire & confidentiality contracts, assigning the work's rights wholly to the Corporation (which is also what grants us the right to release the rights under VPL)—but experience has taught as that digital associates and respect for contractual agreements do not mesh; and if someone is bad faith enough to take credit for other's work, they've also almost always been clever enough to limit the misrepresentation to private or offline conversations where they can't be called out and corrected, while still rumormongering enough to undermine it.

The authorship hash policy will be attached to all relevant releases. These hashes will serve as a canonical record to cross-reference anyone who tries to make doubtful claims over their contributions. They are not any assignment of rights or in contradiction with any agreements made with the listed contributors; our accreditation is provided solely out of good will and in pursuit of an accurate accounting in lieu of the black box.

Hopefully these hashes will discourage lying on our work; we encourage you to not only cross-reference the hashes yourself, but push anyone making claims about contribution to our work or affiliation with the collective to do so in public on Twitter where we can see it.

But I know they won't.

People talk about Remilia all over all day, and they pretend to know us for clout almost as often: they're lying. You can trust they're lying, because our circle is tight, and it's a clear sign that if someone is bragging about their proximity to a close friend to impress, and or undermining our own intent towards clouded authorship to impress, it's very unlikely they're actually inside.

You must understand: Remilia is on a mission, and the art is tribute sacrificed to it. So many outsiders can only see what it's worth now and not in the thousand year timeline; they aren't in Remilia. All the whispering in the shadows, come to Milady Village, tag us and share what you hear, we'll give you the straight story. Otherwise, check the hash.