About

I build infrastructure for digital content – the underlying systems that allow creators, publishers, and organisations to identify content, prove authorship, declare rights, and make those claims independently verifiable.

My background is in publishing. More than twenty years ago, I founded a small publishing house and spent the following decade working in digital media distribution, content supply chains, and publishing technology. It was during this period that questions of content identity, attribution, and rights management became the central focus of my work.

That question has shaped much of my work: once content leaves its original source and moves across platforms, services, and jurisdictions, how can anyone reliably determine where it came from, who created it, and what rights apply?

I co-initiated the International Standard Content Code (ISCC), a content-derived identifier designed to identify digital content independently of location, platform, or ownership. I remained involved throughout its development into the international standard ISO 24138:2024. Taking an idea from an early concept to a globally adopted standard remains one of the most rewarding experiences of my professional career.

Alongside my entrepreneurial work, I contribute to international standardisation and research. My work has included activities within ISO, W3C, and IETF, as well as participation in discussions around AI transparency, copyright, digital identity, and content provenance. These topics increasingly intersect with emerging regulatory frameworks such as the EU AI Act, the DSM Directive, and eIDAS.

Today I lead Liccium, a company focused on making content, authorship, rights, provenance, and AI-related declarations verifiable through the combination of content-derived identifiers, digital signatures, cryptography, and verifiable credentials. The objective is simple: transform claims about digital content into information that can be independently verified by both people and machines.

Related initiatives include TDMAI, which explores machine-readable declarations for AI usage preferences, and Creator Credentials, a digital identity framework for creators and rightsholders.

I am also a PhD candidate at the University of Siegen, where my research focuses on digital identity, provenance, and trust infrastructures for the digital media ecosystem.

I am less interested in technology trends than in building durable infrastructure – systems that continue to function across organisations, platforms, and technological change, while giving creators and rightsholders greater control over how their work is identified, attributed, and used.