In today’s online landscape, cultural and creative professionals face multiple challenges and concerns regarding the management of ownership, rights, and attribution in creative content. Our latest work at DECaDE presented in this report ‘Emerging Futures for Tokenisation and Digital Media Rights’ considers these challenges through the lens of the ORA framework (standing for Ownership, Rights, and Attribution).

ORA brings together distributed ledger technologies, media tokenisation, and the C2PA metadata standard to provide a tool for creators in proving ownership over their digital assets and associated licences, create bespoke and unique licences for their creations, and embed metadata into media in a way that cannot be easily stripped or taken away. Our work on ORA presented in this report combines this framework with design thinking to provide avenues for exploration and critical reflection on how we might overcome the most pressing challenges regarding digital ownership and authorship.

Why ORA?

Distributed ledger technologies are immutable databases that record time-stamped and irrevocable information on the exchange and issuance of digital tokens. In doing so, these technologies provide a history of ownership provenance that can be used to validate the authenticity and ownership of digital tokens. These digital tokens include non-fungible tokens (NFTs) which are used to represent digital assets. Under a process we define as ‘media tokenisation’, NFTs are used to represent digital media files and managed by smart contracts. ORA extends this provenance by integrating C2PA into media tokenisation. C2PA is an open technical standard the provides creators with a way of tracing the origins of different types of digital media. Crucially, when the digital media is remixed from or a composite with other media, such as in the case of AI generated work or mashups, the sources and provenance of this media can be tracked and visualized to demonstrate the historical context or ‘creation provenance’ of the work.

Therefore, ORA’s unique quality is its ability to document both the ownership provenance and creation provenance as a piece of media is shared, reused or remixed online. It does so by creating two distinct NFTs, the first representing an authentic media asset, and a second to exchange as tokenised licences, which can be tracked through the associated smart contracts to identify how works are subsequently reused and engaged with.

ORAgen

Central to our work is the ORAgen demo, a web application that instantiates and demonstrates the technologies underlying the ORA framework by allowing users to create, tokenise, licence, and remix simple colour collages. You can learn more about this and have a go yourself as https://oragen.designinformatics.org

The Opportunities

Our work from this field lab, along with a series of other activities including workshops with cultural organizations and an in-depth interview study that took place from November 2023 – July 2024, has raised multiple questions and concerns relating to ownership, rights, and attribution from the growth of generative AI and the concerns of creator copyright, the ongoing challenges of managing complex and multiple licensing agreements in media collections, to ensuring fair and equitable recognition in the sharing and reuse of creative digital work. While our work in this area is still ongoing, in this report we offer three high priority opportunities in which ORA could help to overcome these challenges:

• Enabling new economic interactions: ORA could facilitate transparent financial exchanges and license royalties, prompting opportunities for potential new economic business modules for creatives and cultural professionals through secondary market licensing sales and micropayments in collaborative agreements.
  
  
• Automating copyright and licensing management: ORA could provide an automated licensing system. The use of such a system should not be overstated as an entire licensing solution, however ORA offers potential avenues to support the management of complex agreements such as orphan works which could reduce labour costs and provide clearer licensing indicators for users.
  
  
• Embedding specific permissions: ORA enables creators to define and enforce specific conditions of their media that could go beyond legal standards to incorporate personal, cultural or social permissions. This is through the underlying smart contract which manages the digital media asset and associated token licences and can be encoded with bespoke conditions.