Vivendi: Content protection initiatives
June 20, 2024
By Colin Mann
Media conglomerate Vivendi has taken several initiatives to protect and promote the creations of its various businesses. The objective is to ensure greater transparency and authenticity of the content produced in the digital ecosystem and to certify that it has been produced in whole or in part by a human being or by artificial intelligence.
This approach comes at a time when Web 3.0, this new generation of a decentralised, more independent Internet, based in particular on blockchain technology, is enjoying renewed interest. The challenge for Vivendi is to use the ongoing developments of Web 3.0 to defend the legitimate interests of all its rights holders in matters of intellectual property.
Fabien Aufrechter, Vice President Web 3.0, said: “Generative artificial intelligence is a driver of transformation and acceleration for the creative industries. But without a tool for authenticating digital content, the risks generated by this technology cannot be overlooked. This is why we are committed to a project to protect all the content we produce, with the aim of encouraging all digital content creators to follow us.”
Vivendi has joined the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) and Havas has become a member of the Content Authenticity Initiative. These two international groups count among their founding members Adobe, Google, Intel, Microsoft, OpenAI and the BBC. Their objective is to propose open-source technical solutions to combat disinformation, online fraud and content piracy by certifying, in a non-falsifiable way, via the blockchain, the origin and the path of digital content.
Vivendi has also become a member of the League for the Security of Web 3.0 and will chair its commission on the protection of intellectual property. This association is a network of around one hundred European private and public players concerned about the security issues related to blockchain technologies.
The press release announcing the initiatives was authenticated as coming from Vivendi using the C2PA standard on the Ethereum public blockchain thanks to the Click solution developed by the startup Nodle. This ensures a simple user experience for both journalists and the company distributing a press release or any other document.
Several other initiatives are being taken in parallel by Vivendi’s various businesses to deploy the potential of blockchain technologies. Prisma Media’s Capital magazine has become the first global media outlet to deploy a solution for accessing some of its content in token-gated mode, a new form of monetisation via cryptographic tokens that promotes ethical CRM by being more transparent and secure. For its 75th anniversary, the magazine Paris Match resented a collection of 75 NFTs (non-fungible tokens) of iconic photos from its archives on the online art gallery superrare.com.