Provenance is protected
Content Credentials for text
C2PA Content Credentials are provenance structures, not disposable spacing artifacts. Before any ordinary cleanup, the local processor runs a bounded structural probe for the C2PA 2.4 unstructured and structured text forms covered by this launch.
The structural preflight
The probe examines the admitted text—and retained original bytes for an imported file—for C2PA A.7, A.8 and A.9 structural forms. It applies fixed limits to raw bytes, candidate count, candidate bytes, aggregate candidate bytes, nesting depth and elapsed time before ordinary character inventory can begin.
Only an exact “not found” result with a complete scan allows inspection and transformation to continue. A candidate, recognized-but-unverified structure or malformed provenance-like structure produces a protected refusal. An incomplete probe produces a budget or deadline refusal rather than permission.
Protected does not mean validated
This launch does not perform cryptographic validation, retrieve remote manifests or decide whether a claim is trustworthy. “Possible Content Credential protected” is intentionally narrower: the structure is sufficient to stop a transformation, but not sufficient to present a verified signer or authenticity judgment.
The conservative stop avoids turning a generic text cleaner into a provenance stripper. The result contains no cleaned output and no selectable changes. To modify the source, a visitor must use a different workflow that understands and preserves the relevant provenance obligations.
Why a second probe runs before output
A cleanup is allowed only as a child of a complete inspection. Before applying selected edits, the processor recomputes the parent relationship and runs the same provenance gate again. This prevents stale or altered page state from bypassing the preflight.
If that second check does not return complete “not found,” there is no transform output or receipt. The page never describes refusal as removal, validation or proof that content has no provenance.
Primary references
These sources describe the external standards or mechanisms discussed above. The property’s cleanup decisions remain narrower than those specifications.