Forensic Watermarking for Secure Multimedia Distribution

Multimedia Distribution Strategy Through Digital Watermarking

The rapid growth of networked multimedia systems has increased the need for the protection and enforcement of intellectual property (IP) rights of digital media. The IP protection for multimedia distribution in the Internet can be elaborated as follows:

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  Ownership Identification: the owner of the original Work must be able to provide the trustful proof that he/she is the rightful owner of the content.

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  Transaction Tracking: the owner must be able to track the distributions of the Work, so that he/she is able to find the person who should be responsible for the illegal replication and re-distribution.

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  Content Authentication: the owner should be able to detect any illegal attempts to alter the Work.

This chapter concentrates on the task of forensic tracking for multimedia distribution applications. Let consider the scenario when an owner would like to sell or distribute the Work for the registered users only. To enforce the IP rights, two primary problems are to be solved. First of all, the owner needs to prove that he/she is the legal owner of the distributed content. Secondly, if the data have been subsequently copied and redistributed illegally, how it is possible for the owner to find the person who is responsible for the illegal copying and redistribution of the data (see Figure 1).

Figure 1.

A multimedia distribution system, where the digital content could be illegally redistributed to an illegal user.