The ORAgen project explored ‘ORA’ (‘Ownership’, ‘Rights’, ‘Attribution’), a type of technical licensing protocol for digital media shared online. ORA combines tokenisation, underwritten by distributed ledger technologies, with the C2PA metadata standard to support content authenticity to digital media, provide creators with a way to prove ownership over their media as it is shared and remixed online, and issue bespoke tokenised licences that can be tracked via the underlying technology.

The project drew inspiration from prior work on ‘technology probes’ and ‘research products’ to design and deploy two interactive prototypes (ORAgen and ORAgen Fables) to engage a wide range of audiences to understand the opportunities and implications of tokenised licensing across different users.
In total, this project directly engaged 86 professionals working in the creative industries and over 128 members of the public, including 29 in-depth interviews, 2 industry workshops, and 4 public engagement events.