Distribution Framework: licensing for the 21st century

We presented our licensing solution, which will provide freelance journalists and media companies with new opportunities to distribute and sell their work, at the recent IPCT event.

The International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC), a London-based consortium of the world’s major media organisations, is the global standards body of the news media. It is composed of more than 50 companies and organisations from the industry, including global players such as AP, AFP, DPA, BBC, Getty Images, PA, Reuters and the New York Times.

The mission of IPTC is to simplify the distribution of information by building technical standards to improve management and exchange of information between content providers, consumers and intermediaries. Committed to open standards, the organisation makes its standards available for free to its members and the wider community.

CPN at IPTC

As we aim to disseminate and talk about our project and its achievements to relevant people and communities, we happily agreed to take part in the IPTC Autumn Meeting that took place in Ljubljana, Slovenia on 14–16 October. After providing a general description of the current status of the CPN project, we highlighted the elements of our initiative that are the most relevant to the IPTC’s membership.

First, we discussed how personalisation is already changing the news industry, and how we are tackling this challenging matter with the CPN project. Personalisation is an increasingly important issue for news publishers, and we think that facing this problem while prioritising privacy is the right way.

The main part of our presentation discussed how our initiative will help democratise the way freelancers and media organisations make news content together in the future. Our distribution framework will allow for easier distribution, utilisation and remixing of news articles and, in the future, pictures and videos.

Distribution Framework

By accessing our Distribution Framework web app, freelance journalists will be able to license any piece of content they own and set the terms and conditions for anyone else in the world to use their material. The licensing system will produce a hash of the content and write it with the attached license(s) on a private distributed ledger, with nodes currently owned by the media organisations participating in CPN.

This system will then produce a universally shareable link with open access. Anyone with the link will see the title and an excerpt of the article and will be able to read the full license and T&Cs and, if they agree, accept those terms. This is also recorded on the ledger, making the acceptance of the terms tamper-proof.

The way the system is designed will make access to articles and content easier, shortening the access negotiation time to a few minutes, and reducing the risk of potential legal battles over content ownership and contract obligations compliancy.

Why is this a part of CPN

We built the Distribution Framework on top of the CPN Platform to enable easier remixing of news pieces, removing most of the legal and negotiation hassle from the mix. With this system freelancers will be able to resell their content to a much wider audience in much less time, and media organisations will be able to share their content amongst themselves without having to renegotiate terms and conditions each time.

What we are looking for from IPTC

As a standards organisation, IPTC is crucial for the future of our project. We are looking forward to working with them on integrating their standards in our JSON and on building a standard together, with the option of open sourcing our code so we can increase its adoption through major media organisations.