Coalition Developing Open Authenticity Standards for Online Content

Companies including Adobe, Arm, BBC, Intel and Microsoft will develop standards to certify provenance of media content, to address disinformation and online content fraud. The Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity plans an end-to-end, open standard for tracing the origin and evolution of digital content, C2PA said Monday. Member organizations will partner to develop content provenance specifications for common asset types and formats to enable publishers, creators and consumers to trace images, videos, audio and documents, said C2PA. Specs will include defining what information is associated with each type of asset, how that information is presented and stored, and how evidence of tampering can be identified, it said: Collaboration with chipmakers, news organizations, and software and platform companies will enable a “comprehensive provenance standard and drive broad adoption across the content ecosystem.” This builds on recent advances in content provenance, including Project Origin; the Content Authenticity Initiative; and C2PA member Truepic's development of the first native integration of hardware-secured photo capture smartphone technology, C2PA said. "There's a critical need to address widespread deception in online content -- now supercharged by advances” in artificial intelligence and graphics “and diffused rapidly via the internet,” said Eric Horvitz, Microsoft chief scientific officer and Project Origin executive sponsor. Organizations interested in joining can apply at membership@c2pa.org.