How content came to carry its own code.

The first ideas about a content-derived, similarity-aware code were developed in early 2016 by Titusz Pan. The motivation was a practical gap: there was no identifier at all for short-lived or user-generated content such as journalism or images.

The core insight was to invert the usual model of media identifiers. Instead of assigning an identifier to content and maintaining that binding, the code would be derived from the content itself, so that independent parties could compute the same code for the same content without consulting any registry.

Later in 2016, ISCC found its first home in the Content Blockchain Project, a consortium initiated to research how distributed-ledger technology could serve the content and media ecosystem. The project received funding from Google's Digital News Initiative to build a first prototype.

This phase established the four foundational components that still shape the standard today: Meta-Code, Content-Code, Data-Code and Instance-Code.

2017

ISCC was prototyped on “Coblo”, a media-focused blockchain built on MultiChain. The first public concept document and the specification repository (then iscc-specs, today iscc-codes) were published in July 2017. By November 2017 the project reached its milestone for content identification.

2018

The first public open source release of the reference code was published as the iscc Python package (v0.9), followed by the ISCC 1.0 specification. In April 2018 the Content Blockchain prototyping project reached its final milestone, with all results released under open source licences.

In 2019 ISCC moved from an open source prototype towards a formal international standard, and the push came from outside the project. After the Content Blockchain Project released its results as open source, Julia Constanze Hahn of Beuth Verlag, the publishing house of the German standards body DIN (today DIN Media), came across the work, saw what a content-derived code could do and reached out to the team.

She championed ISCC within DIN, whose committee for the description and identification of documents (NA 009-00-09 AA) took up the proposal and brought it forward to ISO.

Throughout 2019 the team presented ISCC at industry events across Europe, and the toolkit was extended with codes for audio and video content.

Digital Publishing Award

The Content Blockchain Project won the start-up category of Germany's first Digital Publishing Award, presented under the patronage of the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy.

ISO/TC 46/SC 9/WG 18

At the annual meeting of ISO/TC 46/SC 9 (Technical Committee 46, Information and documentation; Subcommittee 9, Identification and description) in Ottawa, ISCC was accepted as a work item on the proposal of the German national body. A dedicated working group, ISO/TC 46/SC 9/WG 18, was established to develop it and held its first meeting on 29 October 2019, initially convened by Sabine Rüsch, who chaired that DIN committee.

The ISCC Foundation

The ISCC Foundation was established as a non-profit Stichting in Leiden, Netherlands, in May 2019 to provide an independent, neutral home for the standard and its open source implementations.

2020

ISCC was added to the ONIX for Books code lists (from Issue 50), the major metadata standard used across the book-publishing supply chain. Within ISO, the work item was confirmed as NP 24138.

2021

Titusz Pan re-architected the reference software from the original proof of concept into focused, maintainable libraries, most importantly iscc-core (the reference algorithms) and iscc-sdk (a high-level toolkit). WG 18 delivered a study report documenting use cases and adoption interest to SC 9.

2022–2023

The standard advanced through the formal ISO stages: Working Draft, Committee Draft and Draft International Standard. The iscc-core reference implementation was aligned with each draft, reaching v1.0.0 in early 2023. This work was supported in part by StandICT.eu fellowships.

On 15 May 2024, ISO 24138:2024 – Information and documentation – International Standard Content Code (ISCC) was published as a first-edition International Standard by ISO/TC 46/SC 9. Titusz Pan served as the Principal Editor of the standard, authoring its normative text.

NISO, the secretariat of SC 9, introduced the standard to the wider identifier community shortly after publication.

The standard defines ISCC as a multi-component, similarity-preserving code for digital content, specifying its codec, header structure and the algorithms for the Meta-Code, Content-Code, Data-Code and Instance-Code units. The reference implementation, iscc-core, provides a conformant, open source codec under a permissive licence.

Soft binding

WG 18 began preparing a Technical Report on “soft binding” for information identification: re-associating provenance and metadata with content after files are re-encoded or stripped of embedded data. The work is coordinated with ISO efforts on content provenance.

Provenance and authenticity

Two days after publication, on 17 May 2024, ISCC was registered on the C2PA soft-binding algorithm list, among the first algorithms admitted and the first based on content-derived codes rather than digital watermarking. Within the C2PA and Content Credentials ecosystem, ISCC works as a soft binding, reconnecting content with its provenance after the embedded data has been stripped or re-encoded away. It is also listed among the asset-identifier standards in the IEC, ISO and ITU technical report on AI and multimedia authenticity (2025), alongside C2PA Content Credentials and JPEG Trust.

Policy and rights management

As the European Union implements the AI Act's transparency and text-and-data-mining (TDM) provisions, rights-management organizations have pointed to ISCC as a content-derived basis for machine-readable rights reservations. The International Federation of Reproduction Rights Organisations (IFRRO) named ISCC in its 2026 response to the European Commission's consultation on TDM rights-reservation protocols, and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) had earlier featured it in a 2022 webinar on copyright in the digital environment.

Science and bioimaging

Launched in November 2024, the BioCodes project brings ISCC to bioimaging research, using it to verify data integrity, detect duplicates and trace the provenance of scientific images across their lifecycle, from raw data through repositories to publication. Funded by the European Union through the OSCARS initiative (Horizon Europe grant 101129751), it brings together the ISCC Foundation (Titusz Pan), Leiden University (coordinated by Sylvia Le Dévédec) and German BioImaging (Josh Moore).

Continued development

We and the wider community continue to extend the system with experimental units such as the Semantic-Code, which ISO 24138:2024 reserves, and with tooling for declaring and discovering codes, which is separate from the standard.