Policy makers in all parts of the world are trying to tackle the current media crisis and fight misinformation and fake news by enforcing an increased transparency and greater accountability for content that is published online by users and rightsholders. Proper content identification and attribution are a fundamental prerequisite to tackle misinformation and fake news. 

New European legislation on media, copyright and e-commerce (DSA) will shape the future of the Internet. The new European Directive 2019/790 on Copyright in the Digital Single Market will introduce new regulations to the content markets. Article 17 requires online platforms (OCSSP) to clear the rights of content that has been published on their platforms or uploaded by the users of their services. 

This implies, that rightsholders in must publish accurate and comprehensive metadata in a timely manner, and make rights management information openly available and easily accessible for automated retrieval.

Despite the fact that the internet itself is decentralised in its technical nature, only a limited number of popular applications benefit from the content generated by creative individuals and other users. It is the same with professional digital media content online — only a few centralised retailers and platforms control the terms, supply and demand, access to content, user accounts, data and communication.

Business models of media organisations are at stake due to this concentration of power and data by large intermediaries, retailers and platforms and the inefficiency of the markets which results from this situation.

Lack of trust creates oligopolies. Only when trust in content authenticity, attribution and licensing information will no longer be exclusively guaranteed by large and centralised organisations, competition will be re-introduced to the media markets. Existing technology, open-source software as well as the suggested open, transparent standards for content identification and content certification can support this development. We observe a requirement for innovation in the digital media marketplaces.

Decentralised ledger technology, creating distributed trust in content authenticity, attribution and licensing information by using public key cryptography and other cryptographic protocols, is getting mature and being discussed again as an actual solution rather than a hype.

Self-sovereign identity (SSI) and NFTs will create a secondary market for digital content.

Tokenization will support the emergence of decentralized marketplaces that will support a broad discoverability of the assets by curating, bundling, filtering, selecting and presenting goods and items.

Decentralised applications will allow global, borderless, trustless and censorship resistant transactions, organize a convenient customer experience, support content marketing and introduce new and innovative services and ways for the creative community to offer and users to access the content.

Decentralized applications on open blockchain networks will allow the creative communities and consumers to interact directly and securely through accounts they fully control on the platforms they choose. 

Proper content identification and attribution are fundamental prerequisites to tackle fake news and misinformation.

But how can consumers validate content when identifiers and basic metadata are often missing? Although some media industries use standard identifiers (such as ISBN, DOI, ISRC etc.), most of the existing content online does not have an open, standardised and reproducible identifier.

Without digital content-derived identifiers, it is a time- consuming and difficult endeavour for consumers to unambiguously identify digital content and understand, who originally created and published it. Also, we can also observe a political agenda from the European policy makers for more transparency and accountability.

Creators demand respect, attribution and a fair remuneration for their creative work. But without basic metadata, licensing terms and other rights management information, inseparably connected to the content, it is simply impossible to properly credit a work or learn about the terms of use.

Content creators and other rightsholders lack an easy way to provide such information. It often results in the misuse or abuse, when content is published in an inappropriate manner without attribution or available licensing terms.

Networked peer-to-peer transactions in the Web3.0 environment create a need for efficiency and automation of content licensing.