Globally leading technology and media companies including Adobe, Arm, Intel, BBC, Microsoft and Truepic join forces to form a Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA).

The joint development Foundation Project aims to address the prevalence of disinformation, misinformation and online content fraud by creating technical standards for certifying the source and history or provenance of media content. C2PA members’ organizations will function together to create content provenance specifications for common asset types and formats to enhance publishers, creators and consumers to find out the origin and evolution of media content like visual, audio, and documents. These will include defining how information is linked with each type of asset, how that information is presented, stored and how proof of tampering can be recognized.

C2PA will give forums a method to preserve and read provenance based digital content, since open standards can be opted by any online platform, which causes difficulty to establish trust online. Moreover, by the inclusion of various media types at scale, C2PA is driving an end to end provenance experience from the capturing device to the information consumer. They believe that partnering with chipmakers, news organizations, software & platform companies is critical to serve a comprehensive provenance standard and drive broad adoption across the content ecosystem.

C2PA’s formation binds the Adobe led ‘ Content Authenticity Initiative’ (CAI) and the Microsoft and the BBC led, ‘Project Origin’' under one entity. Currently, the CAI is building a system to supply provenance and history for digital media, which gives creators a tool to claim authorship . Project Origin has its roots in the production and distribution of news. The efforts were focused on battling disinformation in the digital news ecosystem by linking signals to a part of content to showcase its integrity and making it available to those using it.

“Adobe is proud to be a founding member of the C2PA along with our partners in technology and media, with the collective expertise of this group, we will accelerate the critical work of rebuilding public’s trust in online content through broad and open adoption of provenance standard and welcomes everyone to join and participate in this effort so crucial to us”, states Dana Rao, General Counsel and Content Authenticity Initiative sponsor, Adobe.

C2PA announcement builds upon several recent advances in content provenance, along with Project Origin’s efforts to create a pipeline for signaling, certification and tracing the history of news content. CAI’s first ever end to end provenance demonstration for captured media online and Truepic’s development of the first native integration of hardware-secured photo capture smartphone technology have also been progressive.

Jatin Aythora, Chief Architect, BBC, said, “news providers should play a vital role in tackling disinformation and we welcome the opportunity to participate in the C2PA Provenance work, which has the potential to support audience confidence in news when trusted sources of information are more important than ever.”

“There’s a critical need while addressing widespread deception in online content which are now strongly infused by AI advances and graphics and diffused vigorously through the Internet. Our imperative is to form and reform technical and sociotechnical approaches to this grand challenge of our time. We are excited about methods for certifying the origin and provenance of online content and it's an honor to work alongside Adobe, BBC and other C2PA members,” states Eric Horvitz, Chief Scientific Officer and Project Origin Execute, Microsoft.

Truepic, CEO, Jeffrey McGregor, says that “Truepic was founded on the principle that provenance-based media authenticity is the only viable, scalable long-term solution to restoring trust in what we see online and firmly believe that ecosystem wide adoption through an open standard is crucial to the long-term health of the internet. The C2PA will streamline the distribution of high integrity digital content at scale, a vital step in restoring society’s shared sense of reality”.

When addressing rising concerns with manipulation and manufacture of news and information, designing standards and technologies which can certify the source and provenance of online content is the key.