Adobe, Intel, BBC, Arm, and Truepic join forces with the tech giant to develop an end-to-end, open standardised provenance solution
Microsoft joins forces with Adobe, Intel, BBC, Arm, and Truepic to form the C2PA coalition. (Credit: Coolcaesar/Wikipedia.org)
Microsoft has formed the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) alongside certain technology and media entities in an effort to counter misleading content.
The other founding members of the coalition are Adobe, Intel, BBC, Arm, and Truepic.
C2PA will be a Joint Development Foundation project. Its members aim to develop an end-to-end, open standardised provenance solution to address the occurrence of both disinformation and misinformation, and also online content fraud.
To counter these, the coalition will develop technical standards for certifying media content’s source, history, and origin.
Members of C2PA will jointly develop specifications for content provenance for common asset types and formats. These are expected to help publishers, creators, and consumers to trace the origin and evolution of images, audio, videos, documents, and other types of media.
According to Microsoft, the technical specifications will cover defining what details are associated with each type of asset, how the information is presented and stored, and also how proof of tampering can be detected.
The open standard of C2PA will provide a method to preserve and read provenance-based digital content for platforms.
The coalition is also expected to bring in an end-to-end provenance experience from the capturing device to the information consumer, said Microsoft.
For unifying technical specifications under a single entity, C2PA will bring together founding members of the Adobe-led Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI) and Project Origin, which is jointly led by Microsoft and BBC.
The CAI is developing a system to offer provenance and history for digital media. This gives a tool to creators for claiming authorship while enabling consumers to assess if the content they are viewing can be trusted.
Adobe general counsel and CAI executive sponsor Dana Rao said: “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 the public’s trust in online content through broad and open adoption of a provenance standard at scale.”
On the other hand, Project Origin’s objective is to create a chain of provenance right from publishing to the point of the presentation.
Microsoft chief scientific officer and Project Origin executive sponsor Eric Horvitz said: “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.
“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. It’s an honour to work alongside Adobe, BBC and other C2PA members to take this critical work to the next step.”