Technical trials and legal tribulations

Understanding the limitations and inadequacies of watermarking schemes paves the way toward engineering more comprehensive and effective solutions in the new digital world.

Abstract

The article reports on digital watermarking technology, which is viewed as an enabling agent allowing more widespread sharing and use of digital content while decreasing worry over piracy. The technology of digital watermarking is just beginning to mature. But the notion of embedding indelible but imperceptible copyright or ownership information in multimedia data already has great commercial potential. Intellectual property protection is one of the most pressing concerns for content creators and owners who distribute and deliver their content in the new digital world. In recent years, research efforts on digital watermarking have emerged in such fields as signal processing, computer science, and cryptography, and an increasing number of proposed watermarking schemes target a wide spectrum of applications. Digital watermarking is a form of data hiding, or steganography, with robust hidden labels as a key feature. Watermark insertion is most likely the only step performed by the content owner. Content owners are generally concerned with the degradation of image quality, often significantly more so than users of the content.