# Verify Journalistic Content Provenance

> Fox Corporation launched the Verify protocol into production in early 2024 to cryptographically prove content origin and establish automated licensing terms for artificial intelligence firms. By June 2024, the organisation had cryptographically signed more than 300,000 editorial pieces on the blockchain. The magazine TIME subsequently joined the platform as its first external publishing partner.

**Sector:** Tertiary sector · **Industry:** Publishing · **Organisation:** Fox Corporation, TIME · **Maturity level:** Production

Canonical URL: https://www.sapientblock.com/en/use-cases/fox-corporation-journalistische-inhalte-herkunft-verifizieren

## Documentation status

- **Project status:** Production
- **Evidence:** Evidence medium
- **Editorial review:** pending

## Description

Fox Corporation introduced a blockchain solution with the Verify Protocol to protect digital publishing content from unauthorised use. Through this technology, publishers like Fox and TIME can prove the provenance of their journalistic contributions in a forgery-proof manner. At the same time, the system allows the definition of clear usage conditions for AI developers who want to use news content for model training.

With the rapid spread of generative AI models, publishing houses face the challenge that web crawlers capture their content without explicit permission or compensation. Fox responded to this change by developing the Verify Protocol, which cryptographically registers editorial articles and images. The solution initially launched on Polygon PoS and migrated to a dedicated Ethereum ZK-Rollup chain for improved performance and privacy. By involving Time Magazine in June 2024, the protocol established itself as a cross-publisher industry infrastructure. By that time, over 300,000 editorial contributions had already been registered, providing AI companies with transparent and legally secure licensing conditions.

## Benefits

- Creation of new monetisation models in the AI era
- Legally secure and machine-readable interfaces for data recipients
- Cross-platform standard for cooperating publishing houses
- Easy verification of news sources for authenticity
- Increased transparency in the fight against AI-generated fake news
- Forgery-proof proof of origin for digital journalistic content
- Automated enforcement of exploitation and licensing rights
- Protection against unauthorised scraping by external AI developers
- Automated proof of journalistic authorship
- Reduction of manual effort in copyright infringement cases

## Challenges

- Standardisation of licensing fees across different media sectors
- Enforcement of copyright claims against actors outside legal frameworks
- Low familiarity of broad readerships with cryptographic verification tools
- Need for broad acceptance by leading technology corporations
- Complexity in the technical harmonisation of different publishing CMS
- Adaptation of existing editorial and approval processes to cryptographic signatures

## Technology foundation

The system relies on cryptographic signatures on Polygon PoS as well as a dedicated Ethereum ZK-Rollup chain, implemented using Polygon CDK and Gelato, to ensure high throughput rates with low transaction costs and tamper-proof verification.

## Sources

- [FOX Announces TIME as its First Publishing Partner on Verify Protocol](https://www.foxcorporation.com/news/corp-press-releases/2024/fox-announces-time-as-its-first-publishing-partner-on-verify-protocol/)
- [Fox Corp. launches blockchain platform to negotiate with AI firms](https://www.axios.com/2024/01/09/fox-corp-blockchain-platform-ai-licensing-verify)