Federated Content Registries

Creators and rights-holders can generate ISCC codes from their content and publish them to open, federated verifiable content registries – an infrastructure that the Liccium platform implements for this use-case. With such a declaration, they bind product information, rights and licences, provenance and other metadata to the unique identifier of the media asset. Rather than embedding information inside the file itself (via watermarking or steganography), the metadata is externalised: it is hashed, published and stored as a side-car associated with the ISCC code derived from the content.

Once declared, federated registries act as lookup platforms: users can discover ISCC codes and retrieve the linked metadata. Through these registries creators and rights-holders publicly disclose their intellectual-property rights and content metadata, making the information accessible and verifiable. This supports a transparent system in which the authenticity and originality of digital content can be verified and AI-generated or manipulated content identified, enhancing trust and simplifying the compliance process for all parties involved.

The federated registries operate on a peer-to-peer architecture in which each registry node can publish, retrieve, and synchronise declarations directly with other nodes. This creates an open network of nodes, reducing single points of failure and ensuring that declarations remain accessible even if individual nodes go offline. Each node is authenticated, and any authorised organisation can run its own registry while remaining interoperable with the wider network.

When a creator or rightsholder submits a declaration to one node, it becomes discoverable across the network and can be resolved from any participating registry. This approach provides a transparent, resilient, and scalable foundation for verifying rights, provenance, and authenticity of digital media—something centralised databases cannot guarantee to the same degree.

• Decentralised Registry Network: Registry nodes form an open peer-to-peer network where rights declarations and metadata are stored and resolved without dependence on a central database or proprietary platform.

• Transparent Discovery and Resolution: Nodes exchange and synchronise relevant declaration data, allowing anyone with an ISCC code to retrieve associated metadata from any accessible registry, even if some nodes are offline.

• Configurable Access and Governance: Organisations can operate their own registry nodes with tailored rules for who may create, modify, or query declarations, supporting sector-specific governance while staying interoperable.

• High Availability and Scalability: The distributed architecture spreads load across many nodes, enabling the network to support large volumes of declarations and fast lookup of rights, provenance, and authenticity information at scale.