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.

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:

• Judy Parnall (BBC), Lead of the IPTC Media Provenance Advocacy Working Group, spoke on a panel on “Content Tracing and Provenance” this morning (Friday) at the AI Zone.
• Judy is also presenting a paper at the IBC Conference on Saturday 14 September: Provenance: What can we Trust?, along with IPTC Individual Member John Simmons.
• Combating disinformation in News: A critical year for democracies at the IPTC Conference on Saturday. Laura Ellis (BBC) is on the panel along with representatives from CBS and GLOBO.
• On Sunday 15 September, Judy presents IBC’s Accelerator Project “Design Your Weapons in Fight Against Disinformation” on the IBC Innovation Stage, along with tech leaders from CBS, Associated Press and ITN.

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.

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.