Issuers, Holders, and Verifiers

Credential issuers

In the context of the cultural and creative industries, any organisation or institution could potentially be an issuer of verifiable credentials and act as a trust service for attribution or assertions.

Let’s have a look at a few examples of potential credential issuers:

• A membership organisation could issue VCs to their members;

• A CMO (collective management organisation or collecting society) or PRO (Performance Rights Organisation) could issue VCs to creators they represent;

• A publisher or media organisation could attest attribution of authors, photographers, and freelancers;

• Digital distributors are trusted and established intermediaries that usually represent a large number of rightsholders. They could act as trust service.

• Any trusted media organisation or publicly known entity could issue VCs.

Credential holders

Verifiable credentials have the potential to provide sufficient identification about the holders as the parties making content declarations, such as:

• Creators, i.e., writers, bloggers, photographers, journalists, musicians, etc.;

• Rightsholders, i.e., publishers, labels, intermediaries, retailers.

	Creators	Rightsholders	Intermediaries
Image	Photographers	Stock photo platforms, publishers; photo licensing agencies	News agencies
Audio	Bands; singers / songwriters; podcasters	Record labels, music publishers, studios	Music distributors, CMOs
Text	Authors; independent journalists; bloggers	Literary Agencies; Publishers (academic, trade, educational, audiobook, news)	News and ebook distributors; libraries
Video	Vloggers	TV and video producers and broadcasters	Video distributors

Credential verifiers

We see many use cases where parties might want to verify content, claims, and attribution. Verifiers of VCs could be:

• Any user who wishes to authenticate the content declaration;

• A platform, such as an Online Content-Sharing Service Provider (OCSSP);

• Retailers and shops that require domain-specific identity confirmation or want to verify claims to content or attribution.