Does ENTITY decide who legally owns information?
ENTITY records claims, supporting documents, identities, contracts and permissions and helps verify them. Legal ownership still depends on valid underlying rights and the appropriate laws and authorities. A valid digital signature proves something about a signed record, not automatically the truth of the legal claim inside it.
A verified record and valid title are different questions.
ENTITY is designed to connect assets, people, organizations, contributions, provenance statements, contracts and entitlements. It can verify that a cryptographic statement was signed and that an asset version has a particular origin. A Rights Passport specifies a legally supported permission: which actor may do which operation, for what purpose, during which period and under what restrictions. It is the underlying contracts and applicable law—not the existence of the record—that determine ownership.
What happens when authority is missing or disputed.
Employment agreements, university rights, source-data licences, privacy law, patents, Indigenous governance and public-sector duties may affect whether commercialization is lawful. A claim may be pending, conflicting or revoked. An asset should not be treated as cleared simply because a database says 'owner.' The rights system should preserve the dispute and block unsupported downstream actions until an authorized decision is made.
The answer above preserves the original whitepaper text; this additional explanation is interpretive guidance, not a new claim of certification, legal authority or commercial launch.