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.

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.

A few months in, things are going very well for the IPTC’s new Media Provenance Committee.

The IPTC Committee was initiated to continue the work started by Project Origin to bring the benefits of C2PA provenance technology to the news media industry. The Committee is chaired by Bruce MacCormack of CBC / Radio Canada.

The Committee has initiated three Working Groups who will be looking at specific issues:

• The Provenance Governance Working Group, led by Charlie Halford of the BBC.
• The Provenance Best Practices and Implementation Working Group, led by Helge O. Svela of Media City Bergen.
• The Provenance Advocacy and Education Working Group, led by Judy Parnall of the BBC.

We have also started the process of onboarding participants for the next phase of the Origin Verified News Publishers List, and have had several organisations already apply.

The first publishers on the list, BBC and CBC/Radio Canada, have already published some C2PA-signed content:

• The BBC has published some images and video with C2PA-embedded metadata showing the fact-checking process that has been undertaken by the BBC Verify fact-checking team.
• CBC / Radio Canada has published images signed with the CBC certificate on the cbc.ca website.

We are planning several events in the future to promote our work and encourage more in the media industry to get involved. Look out for news about IPTC Media Provenance work at the IBC Conference in Amsterdam in September and at other events.

If your organisation would like to be added to the list in the next phase or in the future, please get in touch!

The International Press Telecommunications Council, in conjunction with Project Origin, has established a working group to create and manage a C2PA compatible list of verified news publishers.

The open C2PA 2.0 Content Credentials standard for media provenance is widely supported as a strong defence against misinformation. Recent announcements by OpenAI, Meta, Google and others have confirmed the value of an interoperable, tamper-evident way of confirming the source and technical integrity of digital media content.

Project Origin, as a co-founder of the C2PA, has brought the needs of the news publishing community to the forefront of the creation of this standard. This now includes the creation of a C2PA 2.0 compatible Origin Verified Publisher Certificate to be used by publishers to securely create a cryptographic seal on their content. The signing certificates will be available through the IPTC, who will work with C2PA validators to gain widespread acceptance. These signing certificates will be issued by the IPTC to broadcast, print and digital native media publishers.

Origin Verified Publisher Certificates will ensure that the identity of established news organisations are protected from imposters. The certificates confirm organisational identity and do not make any judgement on editorial position. Liaison agreements with other groups in the media ecosystem will be used to accelerate the distribution of certificates.

The initial implementation uses TruePic as a certificate authority, with the BBC and CBC/Radio-Canada as trial participants.

“As a founding partner of Project Origin, CBC/Radio-Canada is proud to be one of the first media organisations to trial Origin Verified Publisher Certificates,” said Claude Galipeau, Executive Vice-President, Corporate Development, CBC/Radio-Canada. “This initiative will provide our audiences with a new and easy way of confirming that the content they’re consuming is legitimately from Canada’s national public broadcaster. It’s an important step in our adoption of the Content Credentials standard and in our fight against misinformation and disinformation.”

Jatin Aythora, Director of BBC R&D, and vice chair for Partnership on AI, said “Media provenance increases trust and transparency in news, and so is an essential tool in the fight against disinformation. That fight has never been more important, and so we hope many more media organisations will join us in securing their own Origin Verified Publisher Certificate.”

Publishers interested in working cooperatively to advance the implementation of the C2PA standard in the news ecosystem are invited to join the Media Provenance Committee of the IPTC.

For further information please contact:

• Judy Parnall –  judy.parnall@bbc.co.uk – representing the BBC
• Bruce MacCormack – bruce@neuraltransform.com – representing CBC/Radio-Canada
• Brendan Quinn – mdirector@iptc.org – representing the IPTC

On Tuesday 12 November 2023, a group of news, journalism and media organisations released what they call the “Paris Charter on AI and Journalism.” Created by 17 organisations brought together by Reporters sans frontières and chaired by journalist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Ressa, the Charter aims to give journalism organisations some guidelines that they can use to navigate the intersection of Artificial Intelligence systems and journalism.

The IPTC particularly welcomes the Charter because it aligns well with several of our ongoing initiatives and recent projects. IPTC technologies and standards give news organisations a way to implement the Charter simply and easily in their existing newsroom workflows.

In particular, we have some comments to offer on some principles:

Principle 3: AI SYSTEMS USED IN JOURNALISM UNDERGO PRIOR, INDEPENDENT EVALUATION

“The AI systems used by the media and journalists should undergo an independent, comprehensive, and thorough evaluation involving journalism support groups. This evaluation must robustly demonstrate adherence to the core values of journalistic ethics. These systems must respect privacy, intellectual property and data protection laws.”

We particularly agree that AI systems must respect intellectual property laws. To support this, we have recently released the Data Mining property in the IPTC Photo Metadata Standard which allows content owners to express any permissions or restrictions that they apply regarding the use of their content in Generative AI training or other data mining purposes. The Data Mining property is also supported in IPTC Video Metadata Hub.

Principle 5: MEDIA OUTLETS MAINTAIN TRANSPARENCY IN THEIR USE OF AI SYSTEMS.

“Any use of AI that has a significant impact on the production or distribution of journalistic content should be clearly disclosed and communicated to everyone receiving information alongside the relevant content. Media outlets should maintain a public record of the AI systems they use and have used, detailing their purposes, scopes, and conditions of use.”

To enable clear declaration of generated content, we have created extra terms in the Digital Source Type vocabulary to express content that was created or edited by AI. These values can be used in both IPTC Photo Metadata and IPTC Video Metadata Hub.

Principle 6: MEDIA OUTLETS ENSURE CONTENT ORIGIN AND TRACEABILITY.

“Media outlets should, whenever possible, use state-of-the-art tools that guarantee the authenticity and provenance of published content, providing reliable details about its origin and any subsequent changes it may have undergone. Any content not meeting these authenticity standards should be regarded as potentially misleading and should undergo thorough verification.”

Through IPTC’s work with Project Origin, C2PA and the Content Authenticity Initiative, we are pushing forward in making provenance and authenticity technology available and accessible to journalists and newsrooms around the world.

In conclusion, the Charter says: “In affirming these principles, we uphold the right to information, champion independent journalism, and commit to trustworthy news and media outlets in the era of AI.”

The IPTC is proud to announce that after intense work by most of its Working Groups, we have published version 1.0 of our guidelines document: Expressing Trust and Credibility Information in IPTC Standards.

The culmination of a large amount of work over the past several years across many of IPTC’s Working Groups, the document represents a guide for news providers as to how to express signals of trust known as “Trust Indicators” into their content.

Trust Indicators are ways that news organisations can signal to their readers and viewers that they should be considered as trustworthy publishers of news content. For example, one Trust Indicator is a news outlet’s corrections policy. If the news outlet provides (and follows) a clear guideline regarding when and how it updates its news content.

The IPTC guideline does not define these trust indicators: they were taken from existing work by other groups, mainly the Journalism Trust Initiative (an initiative from Reporters Sans Frontières / Reporters Without Borders) and The Trust Project (a non-profit founded by Sally Lehrman of UC Santa Cruz).

The first part of the guideline document shows how trust indicators created by these standards can be embedded into IPTC-formatted news content, using IPTC’s NewsML-G2 and ninjs standards which are both widely used for storing and distributing news content.

The second part of the IPTC guidelines document describes how cryptographically verifiable metadata can be added to media content. This metadata may express trust indicators but also more traditional metadata such as copyright, licensing, description and accessibility information. This can be achieved using the C2PA specification, which implements the requirements of the news industry via Project Origin and of the wider creative industry via the Content Authenticity Initiative. The IPTC guidelines show how both IPTC Photo Metadata and IPTC Video Metadata Hub metadata can be included in a cryptographically signed “assertion” 

We expect these guidelines to evolve as trust and credibility standards and specifications change, particularly in light of recent developments in signalling content created by generative AI engines. We welcome feedback and will be happy to make changes and clarifications based on recommendations.

The IPTC sends its thanks to all IPTC Working Groups that were involved in creating the guidelines, and to all organisations who created the trust indicators and the frameworks upon which this work is based.

Feedback can be shared using the IPTC Contact Us form.

Following the recent announcements of Google’s signalling of generative AI content and Midjourney and Shutterstock the day after, Microsoft has now announced that it will also be signalling the provenance of content created by Microsoft’s generative AI tools such as Bing Image Creator.

Microsoft’s efforts go one step beyond those of Google and Midjourney, because they are adding the image metadata in a way that can be verified using digital certificates. This means that not only is the signal added to the image metadata, but verifiable information is added on who added the metadata and when.

As TechCrunch puts it, “Using cryptographic methods, the capabilities, scheduled to roll out in the coming months, will mark and sign AI-generated content with metadata about the origin of the image or video.”

The system uses the specification created by the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity. a joint project of Project Origin and the Content Authenticity Initiative.

The 1.3 version of the C2PA Specification specifies how a C2PA Action can be used to signal provenance of Generative AI content. This uses the IPTC DigitalSourceType vocabulary – the same vocabulary used by the Google and Midjourney implementations.

This follows IPTC’s guidance on how to use the DigitalSourceType property, published earlier this month.

The IPTC is very happy to announce that it has joined the Steering Committee of Project Origin, one of the industry’s key initiatives to fight misinformation online through the use of tamper-evident metadata embedded in media files.

After working with Project Origin over a number of years, and co-hosting a series of workshops during 2022, the organisation formally invited the IPTC to join the Steering Committee.

Current Steering Committee members are Microsoft, the BBC and CBC / Radio Canada. The New York Times also participates in Steering Committee meetings through its Research & Development department. 

“We were very happy to co-host with Project Origin a productive series of webinars and workshops during 2022, introducing the details of C2PA technology to the news and media industry and discussing the remaining issues to drive wider adoption,” says Brendan Quinn, Managing Director of the IPTC.

C2PA, the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity, took a set of requirements from both Project Origin and the Content Authenticity Initiative to create a technical means of associating media files with information on the origin and subsequent modifications of news stories and other media content.

“Project Origin’s aim is to take the ground-breaking technical specification created by C2PA and make it realistic and relevant for newsrooms around the world,” Quinn said. “This is very much in keeping with the IPTC’s mission to help media organisations to succeed by sharing best practices, creating open standards and facilitating collaboration between media and technology organisations.”

“The IPTC is a perfect partner for Project Origin as we work to connect newsrooms through secure metadata,” said Bruce MacCormack, the CBC/Radio-Canada Co-Lead. 

The announcement was made at the Trusted News Initiative event held in London today, 30 March 2023, where representatives of the BBC, AFP, Microsoft, Meta and many others gathered to discuss trust, misinformation and authenticity in news media.

Learn more about Project Origin by contacting us or viewing the video below: