IPTC Media Provenance Committee

The success of the IPTC Photo Metadata Standard and its sister standard for video, IPTC Video Metadata Hub, led to the IPTC being invited to be part of the design and specification process for the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA), a cross-industry committee that has created technical standards for cryptographically signing images, video and other types of content.

Due to our work, metadata can be embedded in media files and signed with a publisher’s or broadcaster’s digital certificate, ensuring that consumers can check whether the content they are viewing is really the content that was published, or if it was tampered with in some way.

The C2PA group sets the technical specification, and two groups promote it to the world: the Content Authenticity Initiative is bringing the work to the creative industries, and Project Origin is bringing it to the news and media industries.

Adoption by IPTC

In the past few months, Project Origin has been ‘adopted’ by the IPTC, and its work is now carried forward by the IPTC Media Provenance Committee. Working with our members and others across the industry, we will be creating policies, standards, best practices and guidelines to help broadcasters and publishers implement C2PA technology in their newsrooms and distribution channels. (See page 12.)

Under the leadership of Committee Chair Bruce MacCormack of CBC / Radio Canada, the Committee comprises three Working Groups:

  • The Provenance Governance Working Group, led by Charlie Halford of the BBC, is working on policies and guidance for managing the system of publisher certificates and ensuring that the application process is fair, open and transparent;
  • The Provenance Best Practices and Implementation Working Group, led by Helge O. Svela of Media City Bergen, brings together practitioners from IPTC member organisations to share advice, lessons and tools for implementing C2PA technology with Verified News Publisher certificates within their news organisations;
  • and the Provenance Advocacy and Education Working Group led by Laura Ellis of the BBC works to bring the message to the news industry and eventually to the wider public.

The IPTC and the Media Provenance Committee are working hard to make C2PA work. We need as many publishers, broadcasters and vendors as possible to get on board.

To express your interest, under no obligation, please fill in our Verified News Publisher List interest form.