Media Provenance Metadata Patents: Leaders & White Space 2026
Media provenance metadata and signing patents: who holds the claims and where the field is still open
Concentrated but not locked up. the ranked leader holds 433 records and the top 5 combined account for just 18.2% of all 9,679 records in scope — a long tail does most of the filing. Annual filings climbed from 312 in 2017 to a peak of 511 in 2021, then declined to 354 by 2024 — a 31% drop over that three-year span, the last period the trend can be treated as complete. 2025 and 2026 figures are still filling in as publication catches up with filing, typically by around 18 months, so they should not be read as a continued decline.
- 1BLACKBERRY LTD4.5%
- 2SAMSUNG ELECTRONICS CO LTD4.1%
- 3VISA INTERNATIONAL SERVICE ASSOCIATION3.5%
- 4MICROSOFT TECHNOLOGY LICENSING LLC3.5%
- 5GOOGLE LLC2.7%
See the full media provenance metadata and signing analysis in Eureka
- The complete ranking, not just the top five
- Every IPC branch with its share of the corpus
- The most-cited records, and where claim space is still thin
Common questions on this landscape
Who holds the most patents in media provenance metadata and signing?
The ranked leader in this dataset holds 433 records, with fifth place at 263 and tenth place at 204. Combined, the top 5 assignees account for only 18.2% of the 9,679 records in scope, and the top 10 reach 30.1%. That means no single company controls the field — ownership is fragmented across a long tail of smaller filers, so a freedom-to-operate review needs to look well beyond the largest few names.
Is patent filing in this field growing or shrinking?
Filings rose from 312 in 2017 to a peak of 511 in 2021, then declined 31% to 354 by 2024, which is the most recent year the trend can be treated as complete. Because publication typically lags filing by around 18 months, the lower figures shown for 2025 and 2026 reflect incomplete data rather than a real drop in activity. Read the 2021-2024 decline as a real cooling from an unusually active peak, not as the field losing relevance.
Which patent classes cover this technology?
The bulk of records sit in H04L (digital information transmission, 65.3% of records) and G06F (electric digital data processing, 48.2%), reflecting how much provenance and signing work depends on general transport and processing infrastructure. Application-specific classes — G06Q commerce, H04W wireless, H04N pictorial communication, G06K data recognition, B41J printers and G07F vending apparatus — each cover a smaller share and mark where the technology gets deployed rather than where its core mechanisms are claimed.
Disclaimer. This analysis is based on Patsnap Eureka data drawn from a limited snapshot of global patent records and is provided for general information and reference only. Patent data carries inherent limitations — recent filings are under-counted because of publication lag, counts may be on a record or family basis, classification and applicant-name data may contain errors or duplicates, and the underlying search query defines the scope shown — so the analysis may be incomplete or inaccurate and may not reflect the full technology landscape.
Nothing here is an exhaustive prior-art, novelty, freedom-to-operate or validity search, nor does it constitute legal, financial or professional advice, and it should not be relied upon as such. Verify independently and review with qualified patent and legal professionals before acting on it.
Method: Filing trend and technology composition. Derived from a Patsnap search on Media Provenance Metadata and Signing covering 2015–2026, data cut-off 2026-07-31. Counts reflect published records only and shift as new filings publish. Every share divides by all records in scope. Data: Patsnap Eureka. See the full landscape report.