Fox Introduces VERIFY: An Open Protocol for Content Verification and Licensing

Read the Tweet: https://twitter.com/LitProtocol/status/1752019625381126512

AI has vast potential to provide new benefits and extend what’s possible for companies and humanity at large, but, closely examined, comes with notable considerations. With AI, the “post truth” era becomes supercharged with generative media, including articles, images, videos, and audio, where attribution and the line between fact and fiction becomes blurred.

This is a problem space that has been explored in more detail in the past and points to the general consensus that there’s a problem set that demands a thoughtful solution. However, to date, there have not been many practical solutions posed that address these critical issues.

The key to addressing this challenge lies in establishing a system that not only tracks the origin of digital content but also safeguards its integrity. This is the system the Fox Corporation has sought to create with the open source release of Verify, a protocol that provides a framework for content creators and consumers alike to ensure the information they encounter online is not only genuine but also comes from an attributable source.

Verify provides a method for publishers to cryptographically sign content upon publication, building a central repository for content licensing and provenance. longside the Verify protocol, Fox Corporation also released  the Verify Tool. It allows users to validate that the content they see attributed to a source that they trust, actually was published by that source. Each publisher also has the ability to encrypt their content before it is uploaded using Lit, which gives them the ability to license their data using fine-grained access controls. 

Overview of Verify

Verify aims to be a central repository for content licensing and attribution, providing a verifiable chain of trust between content creators and consumers. All assets that are stored on Verify are cryptographically signed by their publisher, the signature serving as an attestation to the origination of the content and linking its publishing to an entity in the real world. Publishers also have the ability to encrypt their content behind custom content licenses, enabling them to have full control over how their assets are consumed. 

At a high level, the Verify protocol contains three components:

1. A metadata standard for the registry and attestation of content provenance.
2. A smart contract that stores references to metadata and content licenses by binding it to a token that represents the asset through a unique identifier.
3. A registry that associates keys with real-world identities. 

Though all data on Verify is transparent and publicly accessible, not all data in itself is public. That is where Lit Protocol plays a role, allowing content creators to restrict access to their content through custom licenses. 

Lit x Verify: Trustless Access Control for Private Data

Lit is a key management network that enables developers to securely manage distributed key pairs for signing and encryption. Within the Verify platform, Lit Protocol serves as a secure signing backend that enables content to be stored privately and under a proper license.

Verify allows users to impose specific access rules on their content, limiting access only to those who meet set conditions. These conditions may use on or off-chain state, giving creators high flexibility in defining the ways in which their content is consumed. A simple example is restricting access to a set of wallet addresses (perhaps members of your DAO or holders of your NFT) which can be accomplished using the allowlist module.

You can learn more about this feature by reviewing Verify’s developer documentation on asset licensing, linked here.

Getting Started

The Verify platform is now in public beta, and you can try it out here. 

For the developer community, there's exciting news: Verify's code has been fully open-sourced. This is an opportunity for developers to engage directly with the platform, fork the code, and contribute to its evolution.