Misinformation and online content fraud has been rampant in the past few years with increased accessibility to technology. To combat this growing epidemic, various entities from the technology and media industry have joined forces to form the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA). Its members include Microsoft, Adobe, Arm, Intel, BBC, and Truepic.
The C2PA will be responsible for developing technical standards that can aid in identifying the origin of media content including images, audio, video, and documents. This will enable those in relevant industries to identify how the information is stored and presented, and whether it has been doctored. Microsoft went on to say that:
The C2PA’s open standard will give platforms a method to preserve and read provenance-based digital content. Because an open standard can be adopted by any online platform, it is critical to scaling trust across the internet. In addition to the inclusion of varied media types at scale, C2PA is driving an end-to-end provenance experience from the capturing device to the information consumer. Collaboration with chipmakers, news organizations, and software and platform companies is critical to facilitate a comprehensive provenance standard and drive broad adoption across the content ecosystem.
Some members of this coalition have already worked on projects of this nature before. Adobe"s Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI) is developing tools for creators and publishers to ensure proper content attribution, whereas BBC and Microsoft"s Project Origin is concerned with curbing the spread of disinformation in digital news media. Similarly, Truepic has worked on "native integration of hardware-secured photo capture smartphone technology". The C2PA aims to unify all of these projects and efforts into a single set of open standards for the benefit of everyone.