OpusData and HAND partner to uniquely and reliably identify people and their digital replicas

May 21, 2024

Every day brings more headlines of the surprising, and sometimes disturbing, ways that AI technology is being used. These developments are making it more important than ever to know what you can trust when you watch a video, or listen to a sound recording. Actors and actresses want to know that their digital likeness is only used in ways that they approve of (including not being used at all). More broadly, control over one’s digital identity is going to be key not only to the entertainment business, but to society as a whole. This week, we’re announcing a partnership with HAND to integrate data from The Numbers and our OpusData service with partners across the industry to help ensure that you can trust what you see on your screens.

Virtually every project we work on with our OpusData customers involves linking datasets, often to allow our customers to look at their existing data in a new way, for example by adding our classification information and box office reports to a hand-curated list of titles they have distribution rights to, or are looking to acquire.

To enable this linking of data, OpusData includes multiple classes whose names end with _identifier. The movie_identifier class is the most venerable of these classes, with over 400,000 entries, covering IDs from over 100 different data sources, including EIDR, TMDB, Lumiere, ISAN, WikiData, and many studios and national film boards. More recently, we introduced the tv_show_identifier class, which has grown to include over 40,000 identifiers, spanning a similar array of data sources.

In both cases, our lead partner in building the ID lists has been EIDR, the Entertainment Identifier Registry Association, an industry association that supplies universal identifiers for “a broad array of audio visual objects,” movies and TV shows among them.

We have now added the person_identifier class to OpusData. Our partner in this new endeavor is HAND (Human & Digital), a start-up that is undertaking the (daunting) task of creating unique identifiers for people, their virtual counterparts, and fictional entities, similar to the work EIDR has been doing for audiovisual works.

Our initial round of additions covers the 1,000 most prominent people in the industry, based on our Bankability Index, and we’ll be adding more over time. As well as our connection to HAND, we’re adding WikiData IDs, and will be expanding to include links to other datasets, including ISNI, TMDB, and many others.

The movie_identifier, tv_show_identifier, and person_identifier classes are all in the reference_data data domain in OpusData, which is available to all subscribers with an API subscription. Those subscribers have access to those identifiers now, and you can get a small peek into the data by clicking here.

As we’ve been adding these new classes, we’ve talked with people who are using connections between datasets to improve workflows. That work has been a challenge historically as different companies keep track of their film assets, manage distribution rights, and attempt to distribute or collect payments due. With the arrival of new production technologies and AI, those challenges are multiplied.

Take, for example, an actor or actress who wants to license their digital replica. It’s natural that they will want control over how that replica is used—for example, they might want to avoid being associated with certain types of content for moral or religious reasons, or simply because they want to protect their brand. While that might have been relatively easy when acting in person, having control when your persona is a file in someone else’s cloud becomes a matter of trusting the many people and companies involved in the production cycle, and then being able to verify that your standards have been met.

Likewise, film producers want to know that the digital replicas they are working with have been approved for use by the actors and actresses they are based on.

We are already careful to make sure that the posters and trailers you see here on The Numbers are studio-approved and properly managed. Our partnership with HAND is a first step in expanding what we offer here on The Numbers, and expands the ways we can work with the most creative companies in the industry. There’s much more to come.

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