CEPIC Joins Content Authenticity Initiative to Promote Trustworthy Visual Content
The leading European organization representing picture agencies and pro photographers, CEPIC, announced today that they’re joining the Adobe-founded Content Authenticity Initiative that seeks to establish new and better standards for attribution and tracking of digital visual content and to promote credibility and trustworthiness of said content.
This may significantly impact the novel visual AI industry and the creation of new legal frames for it, as CEPIC’s weight will help cement the proposed standards globally and in Europe in particular.
The Content Authenticity Initiative: Transparent Standards for Digital Visual Content
The Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI) was introduced by Adobe in collaboration with The New York Times Company in 2019.
The collective has grown to have hundreds of members, including big names like Microsoft, BBC, Nikon, Canon, Reuters, and even stock photo agencies like Shutterstock; early members include Melcher System, the growth accelerator firm from visual tech expert Paul Melcher. It is dedicated to promoting transparency and credibility and fighting misinformation surrounding digital visual content.
Among their efforts is the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA), a complete system to attribute, track, and verify content’s origins and nature via standardized metadata protocols for image and video files, which they hope will become the new industry standard. The C2PA was launched in 2022.
This project gained much more relevance over the last eighteen months with the surge and meteoric rise of AI-generated media, particularly due to its difficulties regarding copyright and its proven potential for misinformation –deepfakes and lack of transparency about the AI-generated nature of images, etc.
CEPIC: A Key Partner to Advance CAI in Europe
The CEPIC (Coordination of European Picture Agencies Press Stock Heritage) was founded in 1993 to represent and protect the rights and interests of picture agencies, photo libraries, and professional photographers all over Europe. Today, the prestigious entity boasts 400 members between large, medium, and small-sized companies and individual professionals, and in later years has expanded beyond the Old Continent, too.
We at Stock Photo Secrets, our founder Amos Struck, and our trusted stock photo agency partner, Stockphotos.com, are proud members of CEPIC. Amos has even been a speaker at various CEPIC conventions.
Having CEPIC involved in the CAI is very significant. Such a renowned organization with so many years of experience in copyright, licensing, and image distribution at scale, and with such a large network, will certainly help increase the adoption of content attribution standards, best practices, and technological infrastructure framed in the CAI guidelines in Europe, plus overall enhance the detection and prevention of fraudulent visual content and provide a more trustworthy experience for consumers and viewers.
Have you heard about the Content Authenticity Initiative before? What do you think about the project? Let us know!
