C2PA releases version 1.0 of world's first industry standard for content authenticity

Today, the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) released version 1.0 of its technical specification, and supporting guidance documents, for digital provenance. This specification is the first of its kind, giving content creators and editors the ability to create tamper-evident media, by enabling them to selectively disclose information about who created or changed the digital content and how it was altered.

The C2PA is an independent, non-profit standards development organization Adobe co-founded last year, and led by a group of industry leaders including Adobe, Arm, BBC, Intel, Microsoft, Truepic, and Twitter. The C2PA was established to provide publishers, creators, and consumers with opt-in, flexible ways to understand the authenticity and provenance across various media types. The C2PA's work is the result of industry-wide collaborations focused on digital media transparency that will accelerate progress toward global adoption of content provenance.

Representatives from many industries — including human rights, publishing, hardware, software, cloud infrastructure, and other — collaborated to write the 1.0 specification and study its use cases. During a period of public comment, the C2PA honed the draft and produced the full 1.0 version being released today. As the C2PA moves forward, public review and feedback will continue to be an essential part of how this work gets done.

As Adobe’s Andy Parsons, senior director of the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI), told Axios, “The speed with which this [specification] was developed and implemented was pretty much unprecedented.” Also, this C2PA specification is powering Content Credentials for digital content attribution in Adobe tools like Photoshop, which was announced as a public beta at Adobe MAX 2021.

To mark the release, the C2PA is hosting an event with discussions on the path forward and demos of what is available now. The event is open to all with registration and will be viewable later on-demand from the C2PA website. (LINK)

Broad adoption of specifications like C2PA 1.0 depend on the important work of advocates and implementers, who will build products from the document. This is best catalyzed through open source, where code can be shared and evolved without licensing or intellectual property concerns. Any interested individual, organization, or company will be able to access three open-source offerings from the CAI team.

Now that the 1.0 spec is live, the next phase in digital content provenance begins. Sign up to receive updates on open-source products and other news.

For more information about the C2PA 1.0 specification, visit the CAI blog.