The IPTC is happy to announce that EIDR and IPTC have signed a liaison agreement, committing to work together on projects of mutual interest including media metadata, content distribution technologies and work on provenance and authenticity for media.

The Entertainment Identifier Registry Association (EIDR) was established to provide a universal identifier registry that supports the full range of asset types and relationships between assets. Members of EIDR include Apple, Amazon MGM Studios, Fox, the Library of Congress, Netflix, Paramount, Sony Pictures, Walt Disney Studios and many more.

As EIDR said in their release:

EIDR’s primary focus is managing globally unique, curated, and resolvable content identification (which applies equally to news and entertainment media), via the Emmy Award-winning EIDR Content ID, and content delivery services, via the EIDR Video Service ID. In support of this, EIDR is built upon and helps promulgate the MovieLabs Digital Distribution Framework (MDDF), a suite of standards and specifications that address core aspects of digital distribution, including identification, metadata, avails, asset delivery, and reporting.

IPTC’s Video Metadata Hub standard already provides a mapping to EIDR’s Data Fields and the MDDF fields from related organisation MovieLabs. The organisations will work together to keep these mappings up-to-date and to work on future initiatives including making C2PA metadata work for both the news and the entertainment sides of the media industry. IPTC members have already started working in this area via IPTC’s Media Provenance Committee.

“In the Venn diagram of media, there is significant overlap between news and entertainment interests in descriptive metadata standards, globally-unique content identification, and media provenance and authenticity,” said Richard W. Kroon, EIDR’s director of technical operations. “By working together, we each benefit from the other’s efforts and can bring forth useful standards and practices that span the entire commercial media industry.

“Our hope here is to find common ground that can align our respective metadata standards to support seamless metadata management across the commercial media landscape.”

Helge, Judy, Bruce and Charlie speaking at the Origin Media Provenance Summit in October 2024.
Helge, Judy, Bruce and Charlie speaking at the Origin Media Provenance Summit in October 2024.

In October 2024, 70 people representing 30 organisations from 15 countries across four continents gathered at the BBC building in Salford to join the Origin Media Provenance Seminar.  The seminar was organised by BBC R&D with partners from Media Cluster Norway (MCN) in Bergen.

Media provenance is a way to record digitally signed information about the provenance of imagery, video and audio – information (or signals) that shows where a piece of media has come from and how it’s been edited. Like an audit trail or a history, these signals are called ‘content credentials’, and are developed as an open standard by the C2PA (Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity). Content credentials have just been selected by Time magazine as one of their ‘Best Inventions of 2024’.

Attendees came from all over the world, including the US, Japan, all over Europe, and also sub-Saharan Africa.

According to the BBC blog post:

In order for news organisations to show their consumers that they really are looking at some content from the real “BBC”, content credentials use the same technology as websites – digital certificates – to prove who signed it. The International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) has created a programme called “Origin Verified News Publishers”, which allows news organisations to register to get their identity checked. Once their ID has been verified, they can get a certificate, which gives consumers assurance that the content certifiably comes from the organisation they have chosen to trust.

For more information about the event, see the blog post on the BBC Research & Development blog.

For more information about the IPTC Origin Verified News Publishers List, please see the Media Provenance section of the IPTC website or contact the IPTC directly.

An image created with Google’s Gemini model. The image contains values for the IPTC Photo Metadata properties Digital Source type (trainedAlgorithmnicMedia) and Credit (“Made with Google AI”).

On Thursday, Google announced that it will be extending its usage of AI content labelled using the IPTC Digital Source Type vocabulary.

We have previously shared that Google uses IPTC Photo Metadata to signal AI-generated and AI-edited media, for example labelling images edited with the Magic Eraser tool on Pixel phones.

In a blog post published on Friday, John Fisher, Engineering Director for Google Photos and Google One posted that “[n]ow we’re taking it a step further, making this information visible alongside information like the file name, location and backup status in the Photos app.”

This is based on IPTC’s Digital Source Type vocabulary, which was updated a few weeks ago to include new terms such as “Multi-frame computational capture sampled from real life” and “Screen capture“.

Google already surfaces Digital Source Type information in search results via the “About this image” feature.

Still taken from a demonstration of how AI-labelling information will look in Google Photos.
Still taken from a demonstration of how AI-labelling information will look in Google Photos.

Also, the human-readable label for the term http://cv.iptc.org/newscodes/digitalsourcetype/trainedAlgorithmicMedia was clarified to be “Created using Generative AI” and similarly the label for the term  http://cv.iptc.org/newscodes/digitalsourcetype/compositeWithTrainedAlgorithmicMedia was clarified to be “Edited with Generative AI.” These terms are both used by Google.

Hannes Schulz from Axel Springer showing their implementation of IPTC Video Metadata Hub for an internal video management system.

Last week we held the latest IPTC member meeting, the IPTC Autumn Meeting 2024. With over 80 attendees, it was a great success. We heard from IPTC members and invited guests on new developments in the world of media technology and metadata.

Speakers from Axel Springer, Reuters, Global Media Registry and the EBU

We heard from Axel Springer who have implemented an internal video management system based on IPTC Video Metadata Hub as a metadata model; from Reuters who are basing their live events streaming API on the forthcoming DPP Live Production Exchange (DPP LPX) protocol based on the recently approved ninjs 3.0, from Global Media Registry who are developing a “Unique Media ID” standard to identify media publishers, and from the EBU on the Trusted European Media Data Space (TEMS) project.

Committees and Working Groups

Our new Media Provenance Committee and its Working Groups are working very hard on the details for implementing C2PA in the media industry, including launching the IPTC Origin Verified News Publisher List. We also heard from Tessa Sproule of CBC / Radio Canada on their implementation of C2PA.

Our Standards Committee Working Groups are also working hard, with new developments on all of our standards and three new standard versions, as described below.

Hannes Schulz from Axel Springer showing their implementation of IPTC Video Metadata Hub for an internal video management system.

New Versions of Sport Schema, ninjs and Photo Metadata

The Standards Committee approved three new standard versions at its meeting on Wednesday 2nd October.

IPTC Sport Schema version 1.1 was approved, adding a Club class so we can model Clubs that contain multiple Teams, even teams that play different sports (who knew that Bayern Munich had a chess team?!). The update also added Associate relationships for individual athletes (such as a coach for a tennis player or a boxer), and facets for sports so we can now declare that an event was a women’s 200 metres breaststroke swimming event using IPTC facets metadata taken from our NewsCodes sports facet vocabulary.

IPTC Photo Metadata Standard version 2024.1 modifies the text of the Keywords property to broaden its scope, matching current industry usage.

IPTC’s JSON standard for news ninjs version 3.0 was also approved, adding requirements for the DPP LPX project including events and planning information, plus renditions support for live event streams. The 3.0 version of the standard also moves property names to “camelCase”, which is the de facto standard for GraphQL and many other JSON-based technologies.

All three updates, plus the NewsML-G2 v2.34_2 errata update, will be released in the coming weeks.

An extract of IPTC Media Topics vocabulary tree browser showing the new "show retired" button.
An extract of IPTC Media Topics vocabulary tree browser.

The IPTC NewsCodes Working Group is pleased to announce the latest release of the IPTC NewsCodes, our set of controlled vocabularies for the news industry.

Updates this time span many vocabularies, with the biggest updates to Media Topic and Digital Source Type.

Media Topic updates

Most of the recent work has been in the politics branch.

3 new concepts: by-election, recall election, coalition building

2 retired concepts: political campaigns, church elections

4 modified concept names (in English): voting system, referendum, fundamental rights, football (yes we finally refer to the sport as “football” in en-GB and “soccer” in en-US!)

Modified concept definitions: 22 civil rights, election, voting system, intergovernmental elections, local elections, primary elections, referendum, regional elections, voting, fundamental rights, censorship and freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, human rights, football, political debates, privacy, women’s rights, breaking (breakdance)

1 hierarchy move: fundamental rights has been moved from politics to society.

Also, the Wikidata mapping URIs have all been changed to point to the http:// version of the URI instead of the https:// version. This follows the official Wikidata guidance.

See the official Media Topic vocabulary on the IPTC Controlled Vocabulary server, and an easier-to-navigate tree view. An Excel version of IPTC Media Topics is also available.

Digital Source Type updates

5 new concepts have been added:

2 concepts have been retired: Original media with minor human edits, and Digital art, as explained above.

8 concepts have had their names and definitions modified, while retaining the same machine-readable ID for backwards-compatibility purposes:

Our thanks go to IPTC representatives and experts from Partnership on AI, Google, Adobe, C2PA, CIPA and many others on making these updates to our vocabulary, which is now widely used to identify Generative AI content.

Updates to other NewsCodes vocabularies

Alternative  Identifier Role (altidrole)

  • Vocabulary’s name changed to fix a spelling mistake.
  • New concept: IPTC Video Metadata Hub ID (altidrole:vmhVideoId)

Event Occur Status (eocstat)

  • Fix spelling mistake “occurence” -> “occurrence” throughout.

Golf Shot (spgolshot)

Rights Property (rightsprop)

Sports Concept (spct)

Go Ohtake of NHK in Japan presents their prototype C2PA viewer on a Web TV platform at the EBU stand, IBC 2024.
Go Ohtake of NHK in Japan presents their prototype C2PA viewer on a Web TV platform at the EBU stand, IBC 2024.

Over a weekend in mid-September every year, Europe’s (and increasingly the world’s) broadcast media industry gets together at IBC, the International Broadcasting Convention.

IPTC members were well represented at this year’s event:

  • IPTC Startup Members Factiverse were out in full force promoting their automated fact-checking solution, which can now be integrated into any media asset management tool via an API.
  • Fellow Startup Members HAND – Human & Digital presented their work on an IBC Accelerator project looking at called “Digital Replicas and Talent ID: Provenance, Verification and New Automated Workflows” along with Paramount, ITV, EZDRM and The Scan Truck. 
  • Moments Lab (previously known as Newsbridge) presented their video segmentation and annotation systems on a very well attended stand.
  • The BBC featured in many sessions. Judy Parnall, lead of IPTC’s Media Provenance Committee’s Advocacy and Education Working Group, presented two papers, both concerning the BBC’s work with C2PA, leading to the BBC’s work with Project Origin and the IPTC Media Provenance Committee. One was presented along with new IPTC Individual Member, John Simmons.
  • Newly upgraded to IPTC Voting Members, he European Broadcasting Union (EBU) had a very popular stand demonstrating several accelerator projects, including the best demonstrator of C2PA we have yet seen: an end-to-end workflow from a Content Credential-enabled Leica camera, along with AI-generated content from Adobe Firefly, edited in Adobe Premiere Pro, and published using WDR’s publisher certificate which is on the new IPTC Verified News Publisher list. IPTC Managing Director Brendan Quinn gave a short presentation at the EBU stand’s C2PA meet-up event, explaining the IPTC’s recently-announced work on the Verified News Publisher List. Other speakers at the meet-up were Kenneth from WDR, Andy Parsons from Adobe and the Content Authenticity Initiative, Go Ohtake of NHK (who demonstrated a prototype C2PA application running on a Web TV platform), and project lead Lucille Verbaere of the EBU.
  • Media Cluster Norway (previously known as Media City Bergen) ran an awesome breakfast event about Project Reynir, their project to make Norway’s media ecosystem a pathfinder for C2PA technology from one end of the production workflow to the other, including vendors such as VizRT and Wolftech, Norwegian news agency NTB and more.
  • Liaison partner The DPP had a great reception where the industry came together to discuss future projects including the Live Production Exchange project on which IPTC is assisting via our News in JSON (ninjs) Working Group.
  • Of course Adobe and Google both had enormous and well attended stands, Associated Press and Reuters were receiving a lot of attention (particular after Reuters’ acquisition of digital content management company Imagen last year). Arqiva and Broadcast Solutions were also represented with well-attended stands.

From what we could see, all IPTC members who attended the convention had a very successful time, and we look forward to many future successful events.

We hope to see all of you again at the IPTC Autumn Meeting next week!

The IPTC has responded to a multi-stakeholder consultation on the recently-agreed European Union Artificial Intelligence Act (EU AI Act).

Although the IPTC is officially based in the UK, many of our members and staff operate from the European Union, and of course all of our members’ content is available in the EU, so it is very important to us that the EU regulates Artificial Intelligence providers in a way that is fair to all parts of the ecosystem, including content rightsholders, AI providers, AI application developers and end users.

In particular, we drew the EU AI Office’s attention to the IPTC Photo Metadata Data Mining property, which enables rightsholders to inform web crawlers and AI training systems of the rightsholders’ agreement as to whether or not the content can be used as part of a training data set for building AI models.

The points made are the same as the ones that we made to the IETF/IAB Workshop consultation: that embedded data mining declarations should be part of the ecosystem of opt-outs, because robots.txt, W3C TDM, C2PA and other solutions are not sufficient for all use cases. 

The full consultation text and all public responses will be published by the EU in due course via the consultation home page.

 

Screenshot of the IPTC Origin Verifier tool showing the content sample from German broadcaster WDR.
Screenshot of the IPTC Origin Verifier tool showing the content sample from German broadcaster WDR.

AMSTERDAM, 13 September 2024 — The International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) has announced Phase 1 of the IPTC Verified News Publishers List at the International Broadcast Convention (IBC).

The list uses C2PA technology to enable verified provenance for the news media industry. News outlets apply for a certificate from a partner Certificate Authority (currently Truepic), with the IPTC verifying the identity of the publisher. The certificate is then used by the news outlet to sign content, in accordance with the C2PA specification’s handling of “additional trust anchor stores”. This means that the news publisher is the signer of the content. This is a key requirement for many media outlets.

Currently the BBC (UK), CBC / Radio Canada (Canada) and broadcaster WDR (Germany) have certificates on the Verified News Publishers List. Many more publishers and broadcasters are currently in the process of obtaining a certificate. To register your interest as a news publisher, please fill out the Verified News Publisher expression of interest form.

To make the process of verifying and approving certificate requests transparent and accountable, the IPTC has released a set of policies for issuing Verified News Publisher certificates covering Phase 1 of the project. The process includes a “fast track” process for media organisations that are already well known to IPTC, and also a self-certification track. The policies were approved by the IPTC membership at a recent meeting of the IPTC Media Provenance Committee.

Verifying publisher identity, not trustworthiness

Note: as we have always made clear, the IPTC is making no claims about the truth or trustworthiness of content published by news publishers on the IPTC Verified News Publisher List. We simply verify that the publisher is “who they say they are”, and then the signature will verify that the content was published by that publisher, and has not been tampered with since the point of publishing.

We make it clear in the governance policies that a certificate can be revoked if the certificate’s private key has been compromised in some way, but we will not revoke certificates for editorial reasons.

Online verifier tool

The IPTC has worked with the BBC to launch a simple Verified News Publisher content verifier tool hosted at https://originverify.iptc.org. The tool displays a special indicator when content has been signed by an organisation whose certificate is on the Verified News Publisher list. The IPTC has also published a set of Verified News Publisher sample content that can be used with the verifier to demonstrate the process in action.

Sharing best practices, resources and knowledge among news publishers

For IPTC members, the Media Provenance Committee has created an internal members-only wiki detailing best practices and lessons learned while implementing C2PA and the Verified News Publisher List at broadcasters and publishers. Information on the wiki includes technical details on how to generate a certificate signing request to obtain a certificate, how to sign content with open-source and commercial tools, how to deal with publishing and distribution technology such as streaming servers and content delivery networks, and how to add metadata to C2PA assertions embedded in media content.

The Committee has also created a public-facing area of the IPTC site describing IPTC’s work in the area of Media Provenance, helping news publishers to get up to speed and understand how C2PA technology works and how it can be implemented in publishing workflows.

Other IPTC and Media Provenance-related events at IBC this weekend:

The IPTC is excited to announce that the IPTC Autumn Meeting 2024 is fast approaching, taking place from Monday September 30 to Wednesday October 2. This year’s event will be held virtually, providing IPTC members with the opportunity to stay informed and connected with industry leaders, no matter their location.

Robert Schmidt-Nia opening the IPTC Spring Meeting 2023 at the e-Estonia Briefing Centre on Monday 15 May.
Robert Schmidt-Nia, Chair of the IPTC Board of Directors, opening the IPTC Spring Meeting 2023 at the e-Estonia Briefing Centre on Monday 15 May.

The Autumn Meeting will focus on the latest innovations in news metadata, standards, and tools that are shaping the future of digital content and journalism.

One of the key highlights of the meeting will be presentations by IPTC’s various Working Groups. These sessions will dive deep into advancements in metadata standards, addressing challenges like improving interoperability and adapting to the rapid rise of artificial intelligence in media.

Another focal point of the event will be updates on how new and existing IPTC standards like NewsML-G2, ninjs, Video Metadata Hub are helping news and media organisations to streamline the exchange of information. These tools play a critical role in ensuring that news content is delivered in a trusted and structured manner across platforms.

In addition to the technical presentations, the meeting will also feature case studies from IPTC member organizations. These will explore innovative uses of IPTC standards, such as the DPP Live Production Exchange project and the TEMS Trusted European Media Data Space.

The new IPTC Media Provenance Committee will come together to present to IPTC members recent activity in the working groups on Governance, Best Practices and Advocacy & Education around implementing media provenance technologies such as C2PA in newsrooms and media publishing workflows. We will hear from members such as CBC / Radio Canada on how these standards are helping media companies tackle issues like misinformation and content verification.

The event also includes the official IPTC Annual General Meeting (AGM), where Voting Members will participate in elections for the IPTC Board of Directors and vote on important decisions regarding the management of IPTC. The AGM is a great opportunity for members to shape the future direction of IPTC and its work on evolving industry standards.

The IPTC Standards Committee will meet to vote on proposed new standards from several working groups, including new versions of ninjs, NewsML-G2 and IPTC Sport Schema.

As always, registration for the IPTC Autumn Meeting is free for IPTC members. It’s an unmissable chance to engage with cutting-edge developments in the industry and collaborate with fellow professionals committed to improving news and media standards worldwide.

For more information and to register, visit IPTC Autumn Meeting 2024.

Screenshot of the English version of cipa.jp, the home page of the Camera and Imaging Products Association (CIPA), a consortium of camera manufacturers mostly based in Japan.
Screenshot of the English version of cipa.jp, the home page of the Camera and Imaging Products Association (CIPA), a consortium of camera manufacturers mostly based in Japan.

The IPTC has signed a liaison agreement with the Japanese camera-makers organisation and creators of the Exif metadata standard, CIPA.

CIPA members include all of the major camera manufacturers, including Nikon, Canon, Sony, Panasonic, FUJIFILM and more. Several software vendors who work with imaging are also members, including Adobe, Apple and Microsoft.

CIPA publishes guidelines and standards for camera manufacturers and imaging software developers. The most important of these from an IPTC point of view is the Exif standard for photographic metadata.

The IPTC and CIPA have had an informal relationship for many years, staying in touch regularly regarding developments in the world of image metadata. Given that the two organisations manage two of the most important standards for embedding metadata into image and video files, it’s important that we keep each other up to date.

Now the relationship has been formalised, meaning that the organisations can request to observe each other’s meetings, exchange members-only information when needed, and share information about forthcoming developments and industry requirements for new work in the field of media metadata and in related areas.

The news has also been announced by CIPA. According to the news post on CIPA’s website, “CIPA has signed a liaison agreement regarding the development of technical standards for metadata attached to captured image with International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC), the international organization consists of the world’s leading news agencies, publishers and industry vendors.”