[MINUTES] CCG Atlantic 2026-07-28

This meeting of the CCG Atlantic focused on "Verifiable Identity for
Licensed Consumer Products," with Wajih Rehman of Fabocus presenting their
work. Fabocus has developed a platform to address the significant problems
in the brand licensing space, particularly regarding the lack of
verifiability in product production and royalty reporting, which leads to
issues like counterfeiting and lost revenue. The discussion explored how
Verifiable Credentials (VCs) can be instrumental in solving these problems
by creating a trusted chain of evidence from IP ownership to approved
product production and sales, with potential applications in digital
product passports and automated commerce. The group expressed interest in
how W3C and other standardization bodies can support Fabocus's efforts to
scale their solution globally.
Topics Covered:

   - *The Problem of Licensed Consumer Products:* The current system for
   licensed consumer products relies heavily on an "honor system" for
   reporting production and sales, leading to significant issues with
   counterfeiting, royalty leakage, and a lack of verifiable proof of
   authenticity.
   - *Fabocus's Solution:* Fabocus has developed a platform that creates a
   product registry and leverages Verifiable Credentials to establish a
   verifiable record of a product's lifecycle, linking IP rights, approved
   designs, and actual production.
   - *Role of Verifiable Credentials (VCs):* VCs are seen as a natural fit
   for representing contracts, approved designs, and the final produced
   product, creating a robust and complete verifiable record for licensed
   goods.
   - *Scalability and Standardization:* There is a strong need to
   standardize this solution to make it accessible globally, with discussions
   around the potential fit with digital product passports and the need for
   open protocols for machine-readable data.
   - *Business Model and Funding:* The primary beneficiary and payer for
   the system is currently the licensor, who benefits from increased
   efficiency, reduced fraud, and accurate royalty collection, with
   marketplaces also playing a collaborative role.
   - *Impact of Regulation:* While regulation is increasing pressure on
   companies to address these issues, Fabocus prioritizes demonstrating the
   significant commercial benefits of their solution independent of regulatory
   mandates.
   - *Repository Implementation:* The envisioned repository system will
   likely be a combination of decentralized registries maintained by IP owners
   and potentially managed by data spaces for specific product categories.
   - *W3C and Standardization Support:* There's an opportunity to expand
   the Verifiable Credential Working Group charter to concretely address this
   use case, leveraging W3C's membership and existing standards bodies to
   anchor the work.

Action Items:

   - Manu Sporny to initiate a conversation with Wajih Rehman about
   potentially expanding the Verifiable Credential Working Group charter to
   include the work on verifiable identity for licensed consumer products.
   - Manu Sporny to connect Wajih Rehman with the chairs of the VCWG.
   - Will Abramson to support Wajih Rehman's work on this initiative.

Text: https://meet.w3c-ccg.org/archives/w3c-ccg-atlantic-2026-07-28.md

Video: https://meet.w3c-ccg.org/archives/w3c-ccg-atlantic-2026-07-28.mp4
*CCG Atlantic - 2026/07/28 12:01 EDT - Transcript* *Attendees*

Benjamin Young, Dmitri Zagidulin, Harrison Tang, Hiroyuki Sano, Jeff O -
HumanOS, JeffO - HumanOS, Lancine Toure, Mahmoud Alkhraishi, Manu Sporny,
Phillip Long, Ted Thibodeau Jr, Wajih Rehman, Will Abramson
*Transcript*

Mahmoud Alkhraishi: Hi everyone. Great. How are you?

Wajih Rehman: Hey, how's it going?

Wajih Rehman: Yeah, Not too bad. Thank you. Can't complain.

Mahmoud Alkhraishi: We're going to give it to 12:05 for people to get on
and then we'll check.

Wajih Rehman: No worries.

Will Abramson: Yep. Hey,…

Will Abramson: how's it going?

Wajih Rehman: Hey, I'm good. How you doing, Will?

Will Abramson: Yeah, I'm thank you. Thanks for joining us. Looking forward
to this.

Will Abramson: Yeah, a couple of minutes. Kick us off.

Will Abramson: Okay, I think I'll get started. So, Welcome everyone to
today's credential community group call. Today we're joined by Wajie
Raymond of Fabricus. He's going to talk to us about verifiable identity for
licensed consumer products. Before I hand over to Waji, I'm just going to
run through the standard administrative items. So you first the W3C
community group and we follow the W3C code of ethics and professional
conduct.

Will Abramson: So please take a moment to familiarize yourself with those
if you're not already familiar and let's continue to create a positive
environment for folks here. second IP note so anyone is welcome to
participate in these calls. However substantive contributors to any CCG
work items must be members of the CCG or IPR agreement signed. If you have
any questions about that just reach out to me or Ammud or Denin. be happy
to help you. third call notes. So these calls are recorded and transcribed
by Google and the transcription and recording are made available through an
email to the mailing list within 24 hours of this next introductions or
reminders.

Will Abramson: Would anybody like to introduce themselves who's new to the
call or maybe haven't said hello for a while, just want to say hi. Feel
free to either jump on the queue or just jump off mute and say hi. You're
welcome. not hearing anybody announcements or Anybody got any announcements
between two they want to share today also not hearing anyone so no reminder
that's fine.

Will Abramson: Lastly before I hand over to Wie work items, are there any
work item progress updates or outstanding things that you want to feed back
to the community on things that have happened? Demetri, I know last week or
a couple weeks ago you had the kickoff for you task force. Maybe you could
share few
00:05:00

Dmitri Zagidulin: Yeah. So, last week was the first call of twice a month,
capability based storage task force where we sort of laid out the road map
for the specs that the task force will be working on which includes
authorization capabilities specification encrypted data vault specification
and the wallet attached storage specification. we talked about how those
three layer together. the relation capabilities or Zcaps

Dmitri Zagidulin: will be used as the EDVS or encrypted data vaults as the
encryption layer with an optional API for application logic that being
wallet touch storage. we talked about what to rename the wallet touch
storage spec and some other things. So a lot of good discussions highly
encourage everyone to join …

Will Abramson: Thanks, And the call times right there on Thursday at 10:00
a.m. Pacific. Do you know when the next call is?

Dmitri Zagidulin: Correct. So, they are on the first and third week of the
month at 1:00 p.m.

Will Abramson: Okay. Thanks.

Dmitri Zagidulin: Eastern, 10:00 a.m. Pacific on Thursdays. So, the next
one will be I believe next the first Thursday of August.

Will Abramson: Thank you. Last call. Any announcements, reminders, or work
item updates? No. Okay,…

Will Abramson: Over to you, AJ, please.

Wajih Rehman: All right.

Wajih Rehman: Thanks, good afternoon everyone. has kindly invited me to
come and join the call today and talk you through a little bit around our
background that is Fabocus and my own background and a little bit around
the journey we've been on in terms of the problem we've been trying to
solve and how that sort of is relevant to this whole verifiable credential
space that has been emerging over the last three years or whatever. So I
have some slides that I prepared.

Wajih Rehman: I'll have a confession to make. I'm not a big PowerPoint fan,
but these are more just to keep me on track in terms of the conversation,
but I'd rather just talk through it. But let me know, you should be able to
see my screen now.

Will Abramson: Yeah, you can see it. Great.

Wajih Rehman: Okay, All right, so I'll start with a little bit about my
backgrounds first. So, my name is Roger Raymond. I am the chief vision
officer of Fabocus. and in a previous life I used to work for an
organization called GS1 which is relevant which is how I basically
discovered this whole brand licensing space and how my whole journey
started in terms of trying to understand the problem that needed to be
solved. so at GS1 I used to look after immed emerging markets and for those
of you not familiar with who GS1 are they're better known as the barcode
standards organization.

Wajih Rehman: So they're pretty much the de facto standard in the retail
space for how all consumer products are identified and they continue to be
the standard even today as there's constant evolution around digital
product passports that are coming into the conversation and everything else
EDI business messaging and data exchange standards such as GDSN ETA That's
and the way I discovered brand licensing was purely by accident where I was
contacted randomly by a chap who was the head of business technology at
Disney Consumer Products where he had read a white paper that was talking
to GS1 standards and basically sort of framing the sort of collaboration
that was going on between retailers and manufacturers in terms of sharing
product information and sharing information regarding supply chains

Wajih Rehman: etc. which sort of triggered a discovery project which we
were overseeing. and what transpired from that, we realized very quickly
that the whole brand licensing space, which I'll come into in a minute and
explain exactly what I mean when I say brand licensing, but if you think of
this whole sort of subsector of the consumer product space was sort of
hiding in plain sight from a GS1 perspective. So if you think about all the
standards that had been developed, but they had been developed from the
perspective of people who are selling things and people who need to move
things through a supply chain, but they hadn't considered the perspective
of someone who has intellectual property and has products being produced
using that intellectual property as a sort of third party arms length sort
of license agreement.
00:10:00

Wajih Rehman: And this basically uncovered this whole discovery for us
where we realized there's a much bigger problem here. It's not just limited
to a Disney problem. This is not just a problem that Disney deal with. This
is an entire subindustry of the consumer product segment that is sort of
living in this sort of black hole and struggling with all various problems
and there's no reason for any of these problems to exist. so that's kind of
where this journey started. and I'll talk to a little bit now about what I
mean when we talk about licensed consumer products. So staying on the
example of Disney, So I'm pretty sure a lot of you will be familiar with
these. If you go into any store these days and you look at toys, apparel or
anything with these very familiar brands that you can think of. So Warner
Brothers, if you think of all the DC characters, Batman, Superman, etc.

Wajih Rehman: all these products that are being sold through these massive
retailers by these manufacturers are being produced under license. And what
that means is, let's say you're a Mattel, you're a toy manufacturer and you
want to produce Batman toys, you would have to go to Warner Brothers and
you would have to say, I want to take out a license to be able to use the
Batman IP or it may be just the DC Universe IP depending on what I want to
do. and then I would have to enter into a license agreement with Warner
Brothers, and that would involve paying a large sum of money to have access
to that IP.

Wajih Rehman: But it doesn't stop there. That doesn't mean that I can just
go away and start producing products and doing whatever I want. I would
have to conform to a process of getting approval for every single product
skew and every idea that I want to actually produce and sell. So let's say
I have an idea for a Batman toy. I would have to use Warner Brothers own
process for submitting the designs of this toy and only after they've given
complete approval that I can actually produce this toy and making sure that
it's compliant with brand guidelines and everything else, I can then go
away and produce that toy.

Wajih Rehman: And then as part of my license agreement, I'm going to be
required to report back to Warner Brothers every quarter, what was sold in
wholesale into those, retail territories. And based on that, I pay my
royalties to Warner Brothers. and if you think about that process. if I'm
Warner Brothers, I have thousands of licences, I think at the moment they
have somewhere in the region 3,000 licenses globally. and some of licences
are some of the biggest manufacturers in the world in their categories. and
all the information that is coming back to me, the only information is a
manual spreadsheet that is being manually populated. and the information
that I'm collecting cannot be verified in any So it's basically we used to
refer to this as the honor bar system. Right?

Wajih Rehman: So, it's basically them claiming that this is what I've made
and this is what I sold and this is what I owe you. And I don't have any
way of actually verifying if what they're telling me is true. In fact, I
have no way of even verifying whether the products they're claiming to have
produced are in fact the products that I gave approval for them to So,
everything is being done on this assumed trusted behavior. And the only way
in which I can figure out whether there's been any sort of adherence or
compliance to this agreement is as part of that license agreement there is
an audit that takes place. if you think of the typical contract term for
each lency on average it's about So after every 3 years and that's assuming
not everybody will get audited after that threeyear term. Some of them
sometimes get delayed.

Wajih Rehman: Sometimes there can be certain audit events that can trigger
an audit ahead of those three years. But basically everything is reliant on
this audit right so it's only everything comes out in the wash during the
audit process and it's through these audits that it becomes very very
evident that the entire process is deeply So there is no actual information
being accurately shared between both parties. the process is so
dysfunctional that you cannot separate or you cannot tell the difference
easily between what might be an honest reporting mistake mistake and what
was an intentional attempt.

Wajih Rehman: to carry out some kind of fraudulent scheme to hide products
that were not approved to be produced or hide sales that were not allowed
to be sold into certain territories, so that's kind of the process, So
that's kind of like this is what has existed in the brand licensing space.
And if you think of this just to give you an idea the scale when we're
talking about this this started off maybe 50 years ago as a small cottage
industry and this has grown into nearly a $400 billion sub sector of the
retail consumer product space.
00:15:00

Wajih Rehman: So quite a significant size not just in revenue but the
number of players that involved and when you think about the fact that on
one hand you've got a lot of this deep collaboration that is going on in
parts of the retail sector where there's a lot of supply chain intelligence
being shared but you have these lensors who are basically operating in
blind in the dark they absolutely have no idea

Wajih Rehman: here whether what they're being told is true. They have no
idea what products have actually been produced and they have no idea
whether royalties that they're collecting are in fact the correct amount of
royalties that they should be collecting. and this is if you think about
the scale you're talking about all the biggest brands. So if you think of
all the studios so Disney's the Warers the Hasbros the Paramounts the
Universals and it doesn't stop there. Pokemon I don't know Nintendo there's
huge brands. so these are massive billion-dollar corporations that have no
process for identifying their products or being able to verify if what
they're being told is true. And that kind of sets up how this journey
started for us. Right?

Wajih Rehman: So we were kind of stumbling our way through trying to
understand how do we fix this problem and how do we do it in a standard
standardized way that would be open and interoperable for all lensors for
all lenses and for retailers and everybody else in this ecosystem to
benefit from it because the idea being that if you solve this problem for
licensors and lenses there is a knock-on network effect across the broader
retail ecosystem where everyone else benefits, So, if you think about the
situation that you have with marketplaces, right? So, you have a lot of
counterfeit goods or products that are being produced by illegitimate
manufacturers today. If you are Amazon or Alibaba or eBay, how do you know
which products are legitimate and How do you know which organizations have
the right to be using certain IP and which ones don't?

Wajih Rehman: So the scale of this problem is pretty significant. and with
that I will just flip on to the next slide. So yeah, I already mentioned
the counterfeit problem, but there's a whole range of problems that
manifest itself from this sort of dysfunction, So I sort of touched on the
counterfeit problem. So that's a very easy one for most people to grasp,
right?

Wajih Rehman: So everything downstream from the whole licensing process
from the moment you've got a product that's been produced and in market if
you're a marketplace or a retailer how do you tell which product has the
rights to use the IP that it's claiming to have used or was produced by a
legitimate LE that's a very obvious problem to understand if you think
about the existing reporting requirements that exist between a lens sour
and a lency How do I verify that the royalties that I'm collecting are
aligned with the terms of the agreement? So if you think about the idea
that within my licensing agreement, I will have strict conditions around
what royalty rates could be applied depending on what property has been
licensed. So for example, I'm the Walt Disney Company.

Wajih Rehman: If you want to, create a Luke Skywalker figure, the royalty
rate might be higher than the royalty rate for a Chewbacca action figure,
for example. but if I have no way of identifying the products and the use
of the IP through the royalty submissions, then I have no way of verifying
whether the reported royalty amounts are correct. so that's another obvious
reporting challenge that they have today. And again it's a real problem.
It's a problem that they've been kind of struggling with but kind of come
to terms with it's just the way it is. They've never actually sort of tried
to think about a way of solving it. and then you've got other challenges
obviously around product discoverability and visibility.

Wajih Rehman: So if I'm a lur and I want to understand which products that
have been produced by my lences are available in which territories and and
on which marketplace platforms. That's not just a compliance challenge for
me. So I'm not doing that purely because I want to make sure that they are
following the terms of agreement but also I want to understand where are
the commercial growth opportunities at the moment. Any attempt to do any
kind of meaningful analytics based on retail sales data is fundamentally
flawed because there's nothing bridging the gap between the skew
information that is available through that POS data and the information
that I have in terms of what was approved right so there's a inherent
disconnect between the designs that I have approved the licency to go and
produce and the way in which the products are being reported through this
pause data
00:20:00

Wajih Rehman: And then last but not least, obviously I'm sure everyone's
aware of the whole AI hype at the moment and all the buzz around aentic
commerce. this kind of then sort of lends itself as consumers and human
beings when we go on to sites we infer trust through certain signals right
so we will normally assume certain sites are more trusted than others right
so without pointing fingers at anybody you might feel a little bit more
comfortable if you're buying off John Lewis versus buying off I don't know
AliExpress or Alibaba right

Wajih Rehman: So there's certain signals that we infer trust ourselves but
if you were a machine how do you do that right so if you're some kind of AI
model and you were being asked to do some kind of research or benchmarking
or comparing products looking to recommend a product that a consumer has
asked you to find for let's say a Star Wars toy how would whether the Star
Wars toys you've identified side are trustable, Have they been, what
signals are there? So, this kind of sort of lends itself to this idea. A
lot of people talk talking about open protocols for sharing information and
making it available, the new recent Google framework for what they call
their universal commerce protocol. and how is it that we can sort of plug
these sort of signals into these protocols whereby that information can be
shared openly.

Wajih Rehman: So this is hopefully given you an idea of the problem space
right so this is what we're dealing with this is what was identified as a
problem and then what was the journey around how did we want to go about
solving it and we started off from a very basic point of we stripped
everything back to its fundamentals. So we wanted to first of all
understand what were the absolute necessary building blocks that the
license or need because there was a lot of if you imagine these processes
and these systems that have been developed inside Disney inside Warner
Brothers none of these guys have been thinking about the problem from an
ecosystem perspective they've all been looking at it from a very narrow
point of view of either a Disney requirement or a Warner Brothers
requirement and they've been building their own bespoke tools and solutions
to solve what they perceive to be a local problem.

Wajih Rehman: The idea never occurred to them that actually lences are not
exclusive to any one license or right a lot of the things that Disney ask a
lency to do are consistent from a fundamental point of view what Warner
Brothers essentially will ask a lency to do so there will be a very similar
contracting process there will be a very similar creative approval process
there will be a very similar royalty reporting process and then there will
be an audit process so the framework is very common and so we set out from
a point of view of let's strip everything back to its bare fundament.

Wajih Rehman: fundamentals, So, there's been years of various bespoke
things that have been layered on top of this which people have just assumed
naturally that they need. And the first thing that we had to do was
actually challenge that status quo around getting people to think about the
problem differently. and this is where a lot of the learnings came from
understanding what had already been done in retail. So how FMCG companies
and consumer product companies were already using existing standards to
identify their products. So this is where the common UPC EN codes were
coming into it and how marketplaces were using those standards to verify
the product. So I don't know how familiar you all are with the UPC and EAN
standards that GS1 are the custodians of but there's a built-in level of
identification in that coding structure. Right?

Wajih Rehman: So every organiz in order to be able to create your unique
identifier that goes into this barcode for your product which obviously has
a whole set of rules around it. Every organization has to become a member
of GS1 and you're issued with your own unique prefix number from which you
generate these EA and UPC codes. So the idea being then if you're Hasbro
and you have Hasbro product being listed on Amazon Amazon can check those
the UPC codes and resolve the prefix number to Hasbro and therefore know
that this number has come from Hasbro and does it match up with the
information that I've been told i.e. is it a Hasbro product or is somebody
just using a Hasbro number to try and get their product listed on my
platforms.
00:25:00

Wajih Rehman: So there was already existing things that are happening
around how products are being identified. but what we realized was that's
fine if you are assuming Hasbro is the only entity that needs to be
idified. So if Hasbro is making their own products and you own and that
product is solely a Hasbro product then it makes perfect sense. you can
rely purely on the UPC and resolve resolution to be able to say this is a
Hasbro product. However, if Hasbro is also producing licensed products for
Disney Warner Brothers Universal, which they do, how do you know whether
this is a Disney Hasbro product or a Warner Brothers Hasbro product?

Wajih Rehman: So this idea of having some kind of digital identity or
digital credential which bridges the gap between the physical ID of the
product and the IP rights that have been assigned by that license or is
where we first started when we started talking about creating this product
registry which was our starting point. So we went on the journey of scoping
out a product registry which would basically take data points from the
license or from the lency, merge them together and create this verifiable
record which basically acts as a system of record That's

Wajih Rehman: says this is the product that has actually been produced by
the licency and these are the IP rights that have been linked and assigned
to it and so you can start to build out this sort of verifiable chain to
say this is the UPC code these are the IP rights and this is the licency
that has a contract in place and then naturally whilst we've been doing
this over the years that's when we stumbled across the verifiable
credential work group and the work that's been done on developing those
standards and when we sort of got into that space and started to understand
the standards that were being developed, we realized a lot of what was
being discussed and scoped and deployed from a standards perspective lent
itself naturally to the problem that we were trying to solve. and if you
were to look at the model that we were trying to create here, the things
that would naturally be represented by a fair viable credential would be,
for example, the contract, right?

Wajih Rehman: So there would be a contract that exists between license e x
and license or y and it would have the terms of the contract the IP that
has been assigned for free peri for what period and for what territories
and that could be represented as a verifiable credential in itself and then
you could have these linked credentials in effect whereby you have a
credential representing the contractual relationship between the license
and the e you'll have a credential that represents the finished design that
had been approved by the license order for production and then you would
have a credential for the actual product that has been produced. And by
creating a link between all these three credentials, you then have this
very robust and complete verifiable record of everything that anyone would
need to know about that product and the rights assigned or the rights
behind that product.

Wajih Rehman: So that's kind of where we saw the opportunity and the role
for verifiable credentials. and then as things have been evolving obviously
with the AI and the Gentic space a lot of what we are now sort of looking
at is how do you make this information available through some kind of
protocol that machines can naturally ingest and sort of interpret and say
for example if I'm a chat GPT model and I'm being asked to go and find Star
Wars toys to buy, how do I know whether the listings that I'm lifting from
eBay or from Amazon have actually got some kind of authenticity assigned to
it and not just some knockoff product. So that's kind of where we've sort
of got to at the moment.

Wajih Rehman: But I think essentially yeah it sort of sums it up here in
terms of what I was trying to say in terms of the opportunity where we see
the importance of verifiable credentials and why they're relevant
specifically when we talk about brand and P. licensed consumer products is
it's only we haven't seen any other example other than where you have a
license or IP rights being licensed out where there is this built-in need
to be able to prove that this product i.e he had the rights assigned to it
and it was assigned by the owner of those So it's not just some seller
who's claiming that he had the right to produce Disney products. You
actually have the proof behind it that's backed up by some evidence that
says, a credential that has been issued by Disney that claims that yes,
I've given this license to produce this product to be sold in these
territories.
00:30:00

Wajih Rehman: And I think at the moment the top of that brings us to where
we sort of are at the moment. we've been operating I would say what for the
best part of five six years now. We are at a stage where this is past any
sort of proof of concept stage. So we've got pretty much the top lensors in
the world signed up using our platform at the moment and having their
products registered through their licences. So, you got Warner Brothers,
Hasbro, Universal, Paramount, all the big studios, other Disney have sort
of having challenges on their side at the moment with their organizational
changes, but that's fine. they'll come back. And I think the other
important development for us over the last year or actually nine months or
so is the engagement that we've had from Amazon.

Wajih Rehman: So, we've had a very interesting lovehate relationship with
Amazon over the years and I would say only the last nine months is the
first time that Amazon have had a dedicated team inside the building
focused on this whole IP licensing space and those guys have been amazing
for us because they've been our biggest champions. So they saw the actual
need and understood exactly what we were trying to do and the problem we
were trying to solve whereby now they are effectively mandating the
requirement to their vendors and sellers and license and basically saying
if you have any licensed products that are likely to be at some point
ending up on Amazon whether it's through a oneP vendor or a 3P marketplace
seller those products need to go through a registration and verification
process.

Wajih Rehman: success with fabricus so that Amazon can actually start to
give it this trusted status. and they're looking at it through the lens
right now, two different perspectives. One is obviously the brand and IP
protection point of view because obviously Amazon is coming under growing
pressure, especially in the EU from a regulatory standpoint around being
doing more to protect consumers from counterfeit products or illegitimate
products. I don't know if you've heard lately, but there's been a number of
fines that have been thrown out in the EU. So, T-Mu was one and I think it
was AliExpress that has recently got some pretty steep finds.

Wajih Rehman: around counterfeit products. and this is more relevant to the
sort of recent EU digital services act and digital markets act. so Amazon
have been a great champion for us and they're starting to do a lot more
work around actually pushing the message out to the IP owners and to the
lenses about getting their products identified and verified. I'm going to
stop there for a moment. and sort of leave it to you guys to see if you
have any questions.

Will Abramson: I confront

Wajih Rehman: Yeah, man.

Manu Sporny: Hey Waji, this is all great stuff. I really enjoyed chatting
with you about this stuff in Brussels. really excited to see all the
success you're seeing and progress you've been able to make. I'm wondering
how we can support you better through kind of the global standard stuff.
One of the things that jumped out that you mentioned is that last item,…

Manu Sporny: those claims be linked and trusted at scale? as you know,
we're working on, this recognized entity specification and…

Wajih Rehman: Yeah. Yeah.

Manu Sporny: based on the nature of the way products are created and
licensed, there's, as a very big mesh of companies that come into play.
it's stuff like that that I'm wondering of course, please don't hesitate to
reach out to CCG or BCWG if you see a gap. do you see any gaps? is there
anything that we can help with?

Wajih Rehman: Def definitely I mean that's exactly where my head is I think
at the moment we are a small UKbased startup that's carrying the weight of
this on our and we see this for this to work globally at scale it needs to
be standardized in a way that it's made accessible for everybody.

Wajih Rehman: So that's kind of where we see the opportunity for this to
work at scale it needs to be brought into some kind of standards framework
and…

Will Abramson: Thanks.
00:35:00

Wajih Rehman: made accessible and available for everyone to use I Yeah.

Manu Sporny: So then I guess to follow up on that, I mean I think you're
aware that, we've got some digital product passport style stuff that's,
happening in the BCWG. Is that the right fit? there and sorry, one more
thing. And if not, are there other organizations that do specialize in
standardizing this stuff? What we've seen is sometimes for example,…

Manu Sporny: the connected vehicle alliance does car standards. W3C doesn't
know anything about cars. so we decided to do the standardization over, it
So where does this stuff do you think naturally fit?

Wajih Rehman: in my gut feeling at the moment I'm leaning toward I do think
the digital product passports sort of area makes the most sense.

Wajih Rehman: But it also depends on I mean a lot of the digital product
passport conversations if you look at across the different working groups
that have been set up like surplus etc. my only hesitation a little bit
with some of it is that it has become predominantly about the
sustainability requirements right and a lot of people seem to be missing
the point that digital product passports do not have to be about
sustainability claims.

Wajih Rehman: It's about identity first. Being able to have something needs
to be identifiable and what is it you're verifying. So I do see a role for
digital product passports for verifying IP claims for products which have
nothing to do with sustainability…

Wajih Rehman: if that makes sense.

Manu Sporny: Yeah, definitely. Thanks.

Will Abramson: Y thanks for that and…

Will Abramson: thanks for it's always great to see real use cases and hear
from the trenches right how VCs are being used and valuably contributing to
real problems that people are facing. I guess I have a question around how
much when you're talking to people around this…

Will Abramson: how much do you go into the technology of VCs versus just
something that happens in the back end and

Wajih Rehman: Yeah. …

Wajih Rehman: here's the interesting thing, If you were to speak to the
license themselves about the problem, they don't have that depth of
understanding, So, we're having to sort of guide them. And this is where we
have to be we're walking a very fine line in terms of balance between the
business problem that they obviously understand. So if you talk to them in
their language, they all understand they've got a royalty leakage problem.
They all understand they've got a counterfeit problem. They all understand
that they've got you product authorization problem.

Wajih Rehman: for example, products get stopped at border control and then
there's a painful manual process of trying to get some kind of letter of
consent from a legal council in Disney to get the product released which
ends up in weeks and weeks of storage costs and loss sales etc etc but they
haven't understood we've had to sort of take them on that journey and
connect the dots for them to get them to understand what is the root cause
for those problems fundamentally the problem is your products aren't
identifiable and verifiable nobody knows that your products, right? They
know that somebody's produced them, but they don't know that Disney
approved this product and this product has come from an approved lency.
That's the point around the technology, I don't think they have an
appreciation yet, we see the role for VCs. I don't think they have a
position on VCs at the moment, if that makes sense.

Wajih Rehman: So we are kind of representing the case for why VCs should be
used to solve this problem. does that mean VCs are the only way to solve
the problem? Probably not. But we do see that there's a broader ecosystem.
that is going to that is evolving and…

Wajih Rehman: it's building around this and a lot of this just makes sense
at the moment from the way we look at it. Does that sort of answer the
question? Sure.

Will Abramson: Yes. Great.

Will Abramson: Thank you. very interesting. Harathan

Harrison Tang: Yeah. Hey, great presentation. I have a kind of a business
model question. yeah, as we know, in the South identity, the trust
triangle, it's a multi-sided, marketplace problem and such a multi-sided
marketplace always have a co-star problem. So, I wonder how you kind of
figured out the business model to solve this multi-sided marketplace. You
talk about and…

Harrison Tang: I can see that licensers has the incentives to kind of coers
the lences to adopt such system but who pays right for such a system and
yeah what's the economics involved

Wajih Rehman: Yeah. Yeah.

Wajih Rehman: And that's a great question, Because this is exactly what's
being discussed with the DPP community at the moment around so who stands
to benefit the most and who should be paying for it. And this is kind of
where we've okay so the primary beneficiary if you think about it is
actually the license right the license is the one who benefits the most
from this is because he's the one who needs to know what is being produced
and he's the one who has the contractual agreement in place with the lency
right so the model that we've positioned is that it's the license that
create is stipulating the requirement to the lences that if you want to
produce
00:40:00

Wajih Rehman: products using my IP then there is a requirement for you to
have a verifiable credential issued by ourselves authenticating this
product and then the benefit for me is then that I have some level of
confidence in that you're not producing anything that allowed you to
produce it also allows me to make sure that I'm collecting the right
royalties so there's already benefit in the existing process process, It's
already being self-funded through that interplay between the reporting
benefit. the efficiency that I'm going to gain. I don't need to suddenly
have a 45day processing team to go through every single royalty statement
that's coming in. I can automate a lot of this stuff because now I've got
properly coded SKUs and I have ways of verifying the IP and all of this
done can now suddenly be automated. So, I've already got a cost benefit.

Wajih Rehman: Then the argument on the marketplaces that is being driven
both by the license and the marketplaces. So what we've seen now is that
there's the license or the marketplaces are working a lot more closely with
the license. So I mentioned that Amazon now has an internal team that is
focused just on licensed products. So they now understand the dynamics here
and they're the ones who are saying Right. We are going to collaborate with
the license to drive compliance amongst the lency community to ensure that
all their products are being correctly credentialed in a way that we can
now say if a license or challenges us and says you've got these products
that don't look legitimate we're able to provide the proof that say
actually these licenses have produced these credentials that prove that you
issued the right to make it that sort of thing.

Wajih Rehman: And then the way the service is being funded today is
mutually so license or pays and then there is a nominal fee that the LE
pays to use the registration platform which is we're not talking about a
amount of money it's just a nominal thing but the bulk of the payment is
coming from the license source. Does that make sense? Where's

Harrison Tang: Yeah. No, makes a lot of sense. I think this one of the best
ideas are usually the simplest one. I think this is one of the best use
cases for such a model. So, no, thank you.

Will Abramson: Yeah, if anyone else has got questions, please jump on the
queue. I guess maybe I'll ask one more.

Will Abramson: I think and you talked about this a little bit, WGY, but…

Wajih Rehman: Sorry. Yeah.

Will Abramson: how have you found, I mean, we talked about the digital
product passport. There's a lot of regulation coming down the pipe which I
guess puts a lot of pressure on organizations and companies to ad do
something around this. How have you found that sort of impacting your
discussions?

Wajih Rehman: It's interesting, because I'm normally not the biggest fan of
init initiatives like this being driven by regulatory compliance because
what you have is what tends to happen but what we've seen is people will
adopt things begrudgingly. there's no real intent. It's not being done with
intent.

Wajih Rehman: It's being done with as a box ticking exercise, To be able to
say, "Okay, I've done this." And actually what we've tried, we've taken the
harder route where we've tried our best not to rely on regulation.

Will Abramson: Thank you.

Wajih Rehman: It's true that there is growing regulation. It's true that a
lot of these companies now understand that they may not have a choice and
they have to do something. However, we don't lean on the regulation
messaging too much or we try not to because we actually try to point out to
them first and foremost there are massive commercial reasons why you should
be doing this, does even if you take the regulations off the table, right?

Wajih Rehman: just from a commercial point of view, just knowing what
products are being produced and having the ability to reconcile your
royalties in a smarter way without having to rely on the license just
telling you this is what I did. when you're talking about the millions and
millions of transactions that are happening and what's been reported, there
is massive commercial benefit to these organizations. So it is interesting.
And I do think the regulation does play a role,…
00:45:00

Wajih Rehman: but we try not to lean on it too much.

Will Abramson: Yeah, great.

Will Abramson: That's really cool. yeah, please go over it.

Phillip Long: Yeah, this is a great presentation and what enormous problem
but I may have missed it in listening through this…

Wajih Rehman: What kind of

Phillip Long: but how are you envisioning the repository? I mean there's
going to be presumably a distributed set of repositories because n one
global one is not going to work. and what are you thinking about in terms
of how that layer needs to be implemented so that a can be found and b it's
maintained by those people that actually know what the particular product
areas that repository covers are expert have an expertise in.

Wajih Rehman: Yeah, that's a great question as well because s also that is
something we've been thinking about a lot of and I think is a combination
between what people are similar to what they're discussing with the digital
product passports at the moment and having these decentralized registries
that are being maintained either by the IP owners themselves or by some
trusted party on their behalf. or also I think there is something to be
said around how some of the data spaces are sort of managing this problem
because I think that's where you get the category sort of specific
expertise.

Wajih Rehman: So when it comes to licensed products there is an argument to
say that you could have a collection of data spaces that are managing these
registries on behalf of a toy apparel category and broken in that way. So I
do see a lot of those things possibly playing a play but defin I mean the
scale of the problem is not going to be achieved through one global catalog
that's for sure put it that way.

Will Abramson: Great. Thank you.

Will Abramson: Any final questions for Wedgie or do you have any questions
that you want to put to the group there?

Wajih Rehman: No no it's been great.

Wajih Rehman: The questions have been great and if this is something that's
resonated with you guys I'd be happy to hear any ideas or exchange any
ideas cuz we're very passionate about solving this problem and we're always
open to speaking to minded people to try and…

Wajih Rehman: find better ways of doing things.

Will Abramson: Great. Yeah, I really appreciate you coming on. man.

Will Abramson:

Manu Sporny: Yeah, I mean on that note, I heard you before saying, maybe
DBP is not necessarily the right place for this work, I completely
understand it's adjacent but not the same thing.

Wajih Rehman: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Manu Sporny: I just want to put the idea in your head that if you think
that we should expand the verifiable credential working group charter to
include this concretely ask for that. I think we'd all love to see the work
happen. The reason I think that that might be an interesting if there is no
one else you're talking about kind of license holders and how you're kind
of trying to take them through the process.

Manu Sporny: It is a new world as digital credential stuff is new world and
the people that need it the most are often the ones that know about it the
least and need the most help along right and so we are finding they might
have a standardsish body or place they make these decisions but they're not
going to be there for 3 to four to 5 years and so if you need some place to
host the work temporarily…

Wajih Rehman: Yeah. Yeah.

Manu Sporny: until they understand or a place where people actually
understand what you're talking about, …

Wajih Rehman: Yeah. Mhm.

Manu Sporny: W3C does have large brand holders, It does have Disney as a
member. It's got, Netflix and, a variety of other people that, make care
about IP. Amazon's a W3C member.

Manu Sporny: So if there is a space that we could create for you for this
work at W3C, I want to make sure that that's very much in the realm of
possibility. The challenge there of course is it's a significant amount of
work, right? You have to show up every week on a call. You have to pull
those people into the call.

Wajih Rehman: Yeah. Yeah.

Wajih Rehman: Yeah. Yeah.

Manu Sporny: You've got to, build towards something. so it isn't without
its downsides but the positive thing is you get to anchor the work in a
global standardization body and that really helps get your licenseors to
understand that this is a global thing it's worth investing in all that
kind of stuff.

Wajih Rehman: Yeah, that would be great to be honest. That's kind of if
that's an option. I think that would make a lot of sense because I think
having somewhere where this work can be done as part of some standards
framework I think will create a great place for these licenses to come and
learn and like you said there's going to be work but I think it makes a lot
of sense that approach for me for sure.
00:50:00

Manu Sporny: That sounds great. So, let's I mean start that conversation. I
mean, Will knows a lot about, chairing and getting that stuff started. We
should also put you in touch with the chairs of the VCWG, but I mean,
that's I mean, you already know Phil, right? …

Wajih Rehman: Yeah, brilliant.

Manu Sporny: and so if you want to do that, we should start the work the
sooner the

Wajih Rehman: That'll be excellent.

Will Abramson: Yeah, great.

Will Abramson: Just following up on that, I was wondering what is the piece
that you'd imagine being standardized? Is it kind of similar to a sort of
context or data model of the thing that's getting issued by the licenses or
Mhm.

Will Abramson:

Wajih Rehman: Yeah, it'll be a combination of right.

Wajih Rehman: So yeah, agreement on I think the data model around that's
definitely a piece and I also think some of the rules around how
identification is being managed. and the linkage between the IP rights, how
that is being represented today. I think there's a lot of opportunity for
that to be standardized and there's also a lot around the systems, So at
the moment you have a lot of bizarre practices where a lot of out ofdate
things. So if you look at the typical software tools that being used in the
licensing space interoperability is not something that is top of mind. so I
think that's going to be something that definitely part of the standards
conversation.

Will Abramson: Yeah, great. yeah, exciting work.

Will Abramson: And if I can help, do just reach out to me. I'd love to
support this. I think it's a really powerful use case there.

Wajih Rehman: Brilliant. Pleasure.

Will Abramson: Yeah. Okay. I mean, I think that's everything I have. Unless
anyone else's final comments,…

Mahmoud Alkhraishi: Thank you so much for presenting with you.

Will Abramson: that we can give people five minutes back. Yeah, great.

Wajih Rehman: Nice speaking to you all of you.

Will Abramson: Thanks so much. Okay, have a wonderful evening,…

Wajih Rehman: right.

Will Abramson: rest of your day, and see you next time maybe.

Wajih Rehman: Yeah. Take care.

Will Abramson: Cheers. Thanks again. Bye.

Wajih Rehman: You guys.
Meeting ended after 00:52:39 👋

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