This morning, Adobe announced the formation of the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA), a Joint Development Foundation project established to address the prevalence of disinformation,  misinformation and online content fraud.

Other founding members include Arm, BBC, Intel, Microsoft and Truepic. The group seeks to develop standards for certifying the source and history of media content, establishing a standardized provenance solution with the goal of combating misleading content.

With the collective expertise of this group, we will accelerate the critical work of rebuilding the public’s trust in online content through broad and open adoption of a provenance standard at scale,” said Dana Rao, general counsel and Content Authenticity Initiative executive sponsor at Adobe.

C2PA members will work together to develop specifications for common asset types and formats, enabling publishers, creators and consumers to trace the origin and evolution of a piece of media. These include images, video, audio and documents.

This open standard will give platforms a method to preserve and read provenance-based digital content. Additionally, C2PA is driving an end-to-end provenance experience from the capturing device to the information consumer.

The formation of the C2PA brings together Adobe’s Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI) and Project Origin, led by Microsoft and BBC.

The CAI is in the process of building a system to provide provenance and history for digital media, giving creators a tool to claim authorship and empowering consumers to evaluate what they are seeing is trustworthy. Project Origin has focused on tackling disinformation in the digital news ecosystem.

“Truepic was founded on the principle that provenance-based media authenticity is the only viable, scalable long-term solution to restoring trust in what we see online,” said Truepic CEO Jeffrey McGregor. “We firmly believe that ecosystem-wide adoption through an open standard is crucial to the long-term health of the internet. The C2PA will streamline the distribution of high-integrity digital content at scale, a vital step in restoring society’s shared sense of reality.”

To learn more about the C2PA, visit c2pa.org.