Protecting ownership rights through digital watermarking

The Internet revolution is now in full swing, and commercial interests abound. As with other maturing media technologies, the focus is moving from technology to content, as commercial vendors and developers try to use network technology to deliver media products for profit. This shift inevitably raises questions about how to protect ownership rights. Digital watermarking has been proposed as a way to identify the source, creator, owner, distributor, or authorized consumer of a document or image. Its objective is to permanently and unalterably mark the image so that the credit or assignment is beyond dispute. In the event of illicit use, the watermark would facilitate the claim of ownership, the receipt of copyright revenues, or successful prosecution. Watermarking has also been proposed for tracing images that have been illicitly redistributed. In the past, the infeasibility of large-scale photocopying and distribution often limited copyright infringement, but modern digital networks make large-scale dissemination simple and inexpensive. Digital watermarking allows each image to be uniquely marked for every buyer. If that buyer makes an illicit copy, the copy itself identifies the buyer as the source.