I have not heard of any viewer applications that supports the spec, though. Do any web browsers have it? All I found with a quick search was this unmaintained draft Chrome extension: https://github.com/serelay/c2pa-web
I guess support will come as more outlets start using it.
Anyway, after spending a little time reading up on the C2PA spec, I think I get it, and it’s not as dumb as I originally thought. I tend have a viscerally negative reaction to any “standard” backed by Adobe, but this one doesn’t seem corrupt or anti-consumer.
A few key points:
It’s an open spec, so it can work with free software.
It’s entirely optional.
This feature is rolling out on the high end, because it is primarily useful to professionals.
Trust in the photographer (as a person) remains crucial in legitimate journalism.
If you want to embed a line of custody into your photos, that’s what this is for. If you don’t, you don’t need to. As the photo changes hands, everyone has the option of stripping that metadata, just like they can now with EXIF data.
Personally I would probably not use this, because I’m not a professional and I don’t generally care to prove that any photos I take are authentic. I would prefer to err on the side of privacy myself, and NOT attach my name to every photo I take, the same way I currently disable GPS coordinates in EXIF tags in my phone’s camera app.
I figure this will be most useful in professional settings such as journalism. If you are a professional photographer, you likely do want to prove that the images you publish were only edited by you. You want people to know whether a photo is authentically yours. If you are a media outlet, you want to continue that chain, both to confirm the photos you’re receiving are authentic, and to prove to your readers that any changes you make are authentic.
AI gets the headline of course, but C2PA is more about proving authorship than it is about reality – whether that authorship is by camera, by AI, or by Photoshop or whatever. It’s cool that photos taken with Sony’s camera have a stamp saying it’s from a Sony camera, but ultimately it’s the photographer’s signature on it that matters more.
I mean, photographers have always been able to lie with cameras, and that’s not going to change. You are trusting the photographer, not the photo. It’s worth as much as that person’s signature, no more.
Ideally, that signature will be impossible to forge. Realistically, I would assume that at least some cameras will be hacked eventually. But it should be extremely difficult, as it is with e.g. the iPhone’s secure enclave. Trust in that signature should not be 100% but it should still be high, at least until a given camera model has a known exploit.
Anyone played with the C2PA spec at all? I see there’s an open source tool for working with the spec, creating, verifying, and appending signatures. https://opensource.contentauthenticity.org/docs/c2patool/
I have not heard of any viewer applications that supports the spec, though. Do any web browsers have it? All I found with a quick search was this unmaintained draft Chrome extension: https://github.com/serelay/c2pa-web
I guess support will come as more outlets start using it.
Anyway, after spending a little time reading up on the C2PA spec, I think I get it, and it’s not as dumb as I originally thought. I tend have a viscerally negative reaction to any “standard” backed by Adobe, but this one doesn’t seem corrupt or anti-consumer.
A few key points:
It’s an open spec, so it can work with free software.
It’s entirely optional.
This feature is rolling out on the high end, because it is primarily useful to professionals.
Trust in the photographer (as a person) remains crucial in legitimate journalism.
If you want to embed a line of custody into your photos, that’s what this is for. If you don’t, you don’t need to. As the photo changes hands, everyone has the option of stripping that metadata, just like they can now with EXIF data.
Personally I would probably not use this, because I’m not a professional and I don’t generally care to prove that any photos I take are authentic. I would prefer to err on the side of privacy myself, and NOT attach my name to every photo I take, the same way I currently disable GPS coordinates in EXIF tags in my phone’s camera app.
I figure this will be most useful in professional settings such as journalism. If you are a professional photographer, you likely do want to prove that the images you publish were only edited by you. You want people to know whether a photo is authentically yours. If you are a media outlet, you want to continue that chain, both to confirm the photos you’re receiving are authentic, and to prove to your readers that any changes you make are authentic.
AI gets the headline of course, but C2PA is more about proving authorship than it is about reality – whether that authorship is by camera, by AI, or by Photoshop or whatever. It’s cool that photos taken with Sony’s camera have a stamp saying it’s from a Sony camera, but ultimately it’s the photographer’s signature on it that matters more.
I mean, photographers have always been able to lie with cameras, and that’s not going to change. You are trusting the photographer, not the photo. It’s worth as much as that person’s signature, no more.
Ideally, that signature will be impossible to forge. Realistically, I would assume that at least some cameras will be hacked eventually. But it should be extremely difficult, as it is with e.g. the iPhone’s secure enclave. Trust in that signature should not be 100% but it should still be high, at least until a given camera model has a known exploit.