Content Provenance Group Formed

A number of influential companies have formed a consortium that aims to reduce the amount of disinformation, misinformation, and fraudulent content on the internet. 

The Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA), a Joint Development Foundation project, has been founded by Adobe, Arm, BBC, Intel, Microsoft, and photo and video verification platform Truepic.

Member organizations plan to jointly develop technical standards for certifying the source and history or provenance of media content. 

In a statement released today, a Microsoft spokesperson said: “C2PA member organizations will work together to develop 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.”

C2PA will use an open standard that can be adopted by any online platform, enabling platforms to preserve and read provenance-based digital content. The coalition hopes that its actions will increase the amount of trust that can be placed in online content. 

Jeffrey McGregor, CEO of Truepic, said: “We firmly believe that ecosystemwide 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.”

Coalition members say that collaboration with chipmakers, news organizations, and software and platform companies is necessary to allow a comprehensive provenance standard to be developed and broadly adopted. 

Microsoft chief scientific officer and project origin executive sponsor Eric Horvitz said technological advancements had helped fake information to spread around the internet like wildfire. 

“There’s a critical need to address widespread deception in online content—now supercharged by advances in AI and graphics and diffused rapidly via the internet,” said Horvitz. 

“Our imperative as researchers and technologists is to create and refine technical and sociotechnical approaches to this grand challenge of our time. We’re excited about methods for certifying the origin and provenance of online content.”