The governance of each Artifact is defined by its Uploader in its associated smart contract. Therefore an Artifact can be defined as a property of an Account States stored memory, or formally:
To the world state (σ ), this initialization smart contract is the Artifact’s creation step. The smart contract is executed in the IVM (Icarus Virtual Machine) to determine permissions around the reading , updating , deleting , distributing , storing , and analysis of that Artifact. Because the ledger cannot govern what users do with the IAN data, the distribution of Artifacts is governed by algorithms outside of the IVM.