Adobe, Arm, BBC, Intel, Microsoft and Truepic have partnered to form the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA), a joint project to fight disinformation and online content fraud through the development of technical standards for certifying the source and history or provenance of media content. The coalition's founding members want to create a standardised provenance platform to combat misleading content.
C2PA member organisations will work together to make content provenance specifications for common asset types and formats to enable publishers, creators and consumers to trace the origin and evolution of a piece of media, including images, videos, audio and documents. These technical specifications 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.
The C2PA's open standard will give platforms a method to preserve and read provenance-based digital content. Because an open standard can be adopted by any online platform, it's critical to scaling trust across the internet. In addition to the inclusion of varied media types at scale, C2PA is driving a provenance experience from the capturing device to the information consumer. Collaboration with chipmakers, news organisations, and software and platform companies is critical to make possible a provenance standard and drive broad adoption across the content ecosystem.
The formation of the C2PA brings together founding members of the Adobe-led Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI) and the Microsoft and BBC led Project Origin, unifying technical specifications under a single entity. The CAI is building a system to provide provenance and history for digital media, giving creators a tool to claim authorship and empowering consumers to evaluate whether what they are seeing is trustworthy.
The C2PA announcement builds on several recent advances in content provenance, including Project Origin's efforts to develop a pipeline for signaling, certification and tracking the history of news content; the CAI's first-ever demonstration of provenance for captured media online; and Truepic's development of the first native integration of hardware-secured photo capture smartphone technology.
Designing standards and technologies that can certify the source and provenance of online content is an important step forward in addressing rising concerns with the manipulation and manufacture of news and information.
