The approval of the International Standard Content Code (ISCC) by the ISO is a crucial step in strengthening confidence and enhancing trust in digital communication in the age of AI.
Years of dedicated development and extensive collaboration with the ISO community and creative sectors have led to the recognition of the ISCC as a global standard for digital content identification under ISO 24138.
The ISCC applies advanced algorithms to generate unique codes that can be used to identify, track, and manage various forms of digital content, including text, images, audio, and video. The International Standard Content Code (ISCC) distinctively focuses on the identification of digital media files themselves, unlike other existing identifiers such as the ISBN or ISWC, which generally tag a particular publication or composition. ISCC can cluster media files that are similar to each other, making it useful for managing copyrights, AI-generated content, and discovering related digital materials.
The sudden growth of generative AI technologies underscores the critical importance of transparent and distributed content identification tools such as the ISCC. As AI becomes increasingly important in content creation and the web is flooded with billions of media assets, the ISCC’s adoption as an ISO standard plays a central role in promoting ethical and responsible use of digital content, ensuring that creators are recognised for their work and that users can trust the authenticity of the content they consume.
The ISCC empowers those interacting with the content – be it original creators, rightsholders, platforms, or consumers – to generate an ISCC code directly from the digital media file using open-source software. Developer tools are available to assist startups and media organisations in integrating the ISCC into their existing software ecosystems.
The ISCC Foundation invites all interested individuals and organisations to explore the ISCC website, subscribe to the newsletter, and join a growing community dedicated to making digital content identification more accessible, efficient, and secure for everyone.
Further information
ISCC homepage:
https://iscc.io
ISO project page
https://www.iso.org/standard/77899.html
Further information
Titusz Pan
tp@iscc.io
Quotes
“Digital media content is continuously re-encoded, resized, and re-compressed, such that its underlying data changes as it travels through a complex network of actors and systems with different requirements. The ISCC accounts for the dynamic nature of digital content and supports automated detection and matching of related content.” – Titusz Pan (Director ISCC Foundation)
“The ISCC is the missing link between media content and its traditional identifiers which reference a work but not the content itself.” – Kira Lemke (Board Member ISCC Foundation)
“The ISCC represents a paradigm shift of digital content identification. The fact that an identifier with near-duplicate matching capabilities is generated directly from the media file, allowing to bind rights, metadata, and attribution without the need for embedded metadata, watermarks, or file naming conventions, makes it uniquely versatile and incredibly efficient. – This ISO publication is not only a milestone for the ISCC, but also an important step forward for content creators and consumers worldwide, ensuring integrity and trust in the digital content ecosystem.” – Sebastian Posth (ISCC Foundation, Liccium B.V.)
Regulation & Policy
“Now that we can combine the ownerless ISCC with proprietary industry identifiers, we will open the rights data framework to build a digital single market across creative sectors and national jurisdictions, in the European Union and beyond.“ – Philippe Rixhon (ISCC Foundation Advisor and co-author of the EC study on Copyright & New Technologies)
Securing competitiveness in the digital sphere
“By making the ISCC an integral part of Content.Agent, we empower our users to finally claim real ownership of their content IP and licenses in the digital landscape — a crucial step for enhancing competitiveness and market relevance in the future.” – Frank Schulleri (Content.Agent – The Marketplace for Content License Trading)
Copyright
“The ISCC ushers in a new era for copyright protection, offering creators a powerful tool to attach their assertion against unauthorised AI training to their creative works, no matter where the creative work appears in the digital world. This standard is crucial in championing creator rights in the GenAI era.” – Roanie Levy (Past-CEO of Access Copyright and ISCC Foundation Advisor)
Scholarly infrastructure and cultural heritage
“ISCC delivers a piece of open, reproducible information infrastructure, which is highly anticipated not only by the creative industry, but by scholarly communication and cultural heritage as well. Clustering of works is essential for knowledge discovery – by now, search portals etc. achieve this only by proprietary, non-interoperable means. (Persistent Identifiers are great but will never be sufficient to that end.) In addition to this, large scale analysis of how knowledge pieces are being reused, analysis on characteristics of dark archives etc will greatly benefit from this exciting new ISO standard.” – Lambert Heller (ISCC Foundation Advisor and director of Open Science Lab at TIB – Leibniz Information Center for Science and Technology)
