Three technologies, each sold as creator control. Each controls something different, and none of them, on its own, makes a creator the owner of their work.
Dennismary Chidiebere22 January 20265 min read
Operator Notes
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Field notes from building, deciding and carrying the cost of clarity.
At some point in every conversation about creator rights, three technologies get named in the same breath. DRM will protect the work. Content credentials will prove who made it. Decentralised storage will put it beyond any platform's reach.
All three are real, and all three matter. They are also routinely confused with each other, and with something none of them provides: ownership.
As 2025 closed, Circo had one of them live in production and a second on its roadmap. This is the map we drew to keep them straight.
Four kinds of control
Our peer-to-peer experiments kept arriving at the same split. When a creator says they want control of their work, they mean four different things.
Ownership. The work is legally and economically theirs. They hold the rights, they decide the licence, they are paid for its use.
Provenance. Anyone can tell where the work came from, who made it and whether it has been altered.
Access control. Only the people the creator's terms allow can watch it, and the rule is enforced, not merely requested.
Distribution. The work can be reached, reliably, and no single party can quietly make it disappear.
Every technology in this space addresses one or two of these. The mistake is to buy one and believe you have all four.
Four kinds of control
Technology
Ownership
Provenance
Access control
Distribution
Does not control
Does not control
ControlsControls
Does not control
Does not control
ControlsControls
Does not control
Does not control
Does not control
PartlyPartly
Does not control
ControlsControls
ControlsControls
Does not control
PartlyPartly
Does not control
DRM. Controls decryption. Only a licence carries the key, and the licence is issued only when the access rule says yes. It says nothing about who made the work.
Four kinds of control, and which technology provides each.
Technology
Ownership
Provenance
Access control
Distribution
DRM
No
No
Controls
No
C2PA
No
Controls
No
No
Decentralised storage
No
Partly
No
Controls
Contracts and terms
Controls
No
Partly
No
DRM. Controls decryption. Only a licence carries the key, and the licence is issued only when the access rule says yes. It says nothing about who made the work.
C2PA. Records provenance in a signed manifest bound to the content's bytes. It neither prevents copying nor establishes legal ownership, and a manifest can be stripped.
Decentralised storage. Keeps the work reachable without one company and lets anyone check a copy is genuine. A signed log proves which key published it, not who made it. Access stays open.
Contracts and terms. Where ownership actually lives: rights, licences and the access rules that DRM then enforces. No file format can grant it.
Fig. 1Choose a technology to see what it controls. Each covers one kind of control; ownership itself sits in contracts, not code.
DRM controls access
DRM is the most misunderstood of the three, partly because of its name. It does not manage rights in any legal sense. It controls decryption.
On the web, the browser's Encrypted Media Extensions are the API a player uses to talk to a content decryption module on the device. The standard is explicit that it does not itself define a DRM system; it is the common doorway real systems plug into. The video is encrypted with Common Encryption, a standard that lets one encrypted file be unlocked by different DRM systems on different devices. The player requests a licence, and only a licence carries the key.
That is why I describe DRM as a business rule rather than a cryptography feature. At Circo the encrypted segments are the same bytes for every viewer, and the licence is issued only after the platform's rights service answers one commercial question: is this viewer entitled to this video? DRM is what makes that answer binding.
What DRM does not do is just as important. It says nothing about who made the video. It does not stop someone recording a screen. And it does not make the creator the owner; it enforces whatever access rule the platform applies, which is only as fair as the rule.
C2PA records provenance
C2PA, from the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity, is the open standard behind what users see as Content Credentials. It attaches a signed record to a piece of media, a manifest, describing where it came from and what has been done to it.
A manifest is a set of assertions, statements about the content such as how it was created or edited, bound together by a claim that is cryptographically signed. The signer's identity rests on X.509 certificates, the same family of trust used across the web. A hard binding ties the manifest to the exact bytes with hashes, so any tampering is detectable. Soft bindings, such as fingerprints or watermarks, let the content be matched to its record even after the bits change. The specification, now at version 2.x, covers mainstream video containers including MP4 and fragmented MP4.
C2PA is honest about its limits, and so should we be. Validation tells you whether a manifest is intact and well formed; it does not tell you whether the content is true. A manifest can be stripped from a file along with its metadata. And a provenance record is not a title deed. It states who signed a claim about the content. It neither prevents copying nor establishes legal ownership.
That is still a great deal. When a creator's work is re-uploaded by someone else, a signed provenance record made at the moment of publishing is the strongest technical evidence that exists of who published it first. That is why C2PA signing at upload is the next layer on Circo's roadmap, so that videos carry that record from the moment they enter the platform.
Decentralised storage governs distribution
Decentralised storage, explored in Can You Really Own a Video? and What Happens When a P2P Video Has 100,000 Viewers?, controls where the bytes live and who can serve them. Signed, content-verified logs let anyone check that a copy is genuine. A swarm keeps the work reachable without depending on one company.
That is real control over distribution, and a partial contribution to provenance, because a signed log proves which key published the file. It does not control access: a swarm is public by nature, and paid content in one must be encrypted, which hands the decision straight back to whoever issues the keys. And it does not establish ownership any more than a hard drive does.
Ownership is not a file format
Lay the three side by side and the gap is plain. DRM controls access. C2PA records provenance. Decentralised storage governs distribution. Nothing in the list makes a creator the owner of their work.
Ownership lives somewhere else: in contracts, in licences, in a platform's terms and in law. It is a relationship between people, and technology can only support it. Provenance gives a creator evidence. Access control gives a creator's terms teeth. Distribution gives a creator resilience. Ownership is what those three are for.
For a platform, this changes the honest pitch. We do not tell creators that a technology makes them owners. We can tell them precisely which part of control each layer provides, and build the layers that match the promises we make.
At Circo that meant DRM first, because the business is paid video, and an access rule that is not enforced is not a rule. It means provenance next, because creators deserve a record of authorship that travels with their work. And it means leaving decentralised distribution as a design we understand well and might use for what it is good at, rather than a claim we would make about ownership.
Control is not one thing. Name the four, and you can see what you are actually building.