Complementary solutions

Various technical approaches are available today to address the challenges of the current media environment, such as building trust in the authenticity of digital media content, managing claims and AI-generated content, or providing information about original human-created content, creators, and rightsholders. It is their common aim to provide reliable reference data or “ground truth” for original publications.

In photojournalism and in the news sector, initiatives are being taken to establish standards that embed digital signatures, along with claims to the content into the metadata of media files. Meanwhile, other rightsholders or providers of generative AI are incorporating watermarks and data directly into the visible and invisible parts of the content to enable information extraction about content and rightsholders. YouTube's Content ID system is the most relevant content recognition software and royalty distribution system available online today. Furthermore, several services now offer content timestamping both on-chain and off-chain. Additionally, minting NFTs is emerging as a new way to claim and track ownership of unique digital media assets on the blockchain.