Article 50 is in force. Model providers are shipping watermarks — your app still owes the duty, and the proof.

No. This is an implementation kit — organized information and ready-to-use artifacts built from the regulation, the Code of Practice, and the Commission's guidance, each with source citations. For legal questions about your specific situation, consult counsel; the kit will make that conversation shorter and cheaper.

No. The 2026 Digital Omnibus postponed the high-risk system obligations to 2027–2028. Article 50's transparency duties were not postponed: they apply from 2 August 2026, with a transition window only for the machine-readable marking of systems already on the market.

No — and 2026 made this trap sharper in both directions. OpenAI ships C2PA + SynthID on images and Google ships SynthID today; Anthropic announced text watermarking + C2PA in August but it isn't live yet. Relying on "my provider handles it" fails one way when marks get stripped in your pipeline — and the other way when they were never there. The final Guidelines settled that the application-layer provider owes the duty. The kit's upstream checklist confirms what your provider actually emits, the survival tests prove what reaches your users, and the evidence log records both.

Transparency-obligation breaches carry fines set by the Act's penalty regime (the kit states the exact tier with citations). The bigger near-term risk for small vendors is enterprise customers demanding proof of compliance in procurement — the evidence log answers both.

Free checklists tell you the law exists. This hands you the sentences, the metadata implementation steps, and the register — the parts that otherwise cost a week of your time or four figures of counsel time.