New Watermark Helps Detect Copyright Infringement Online

New Watermark Helps Detect Copyright Infringement Online

By Michael Hayes
Thursday, March 1, 2007

BEAVERTON, Ore. — The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has issued a patent to Digimarc Corporation for a software application that uses watermarks to scour the Internet for unauthorized content and report violations to the rights holder.

According to Digimarc CEO Bruce Davis, the patent covers an as yet unnamed application that the company is working on to solve copyright issues posed by user-generated content and social networking sites such as YouTube and MySpace.

The ideas protected by the Digimarc patent would allow content producers to embed contact information in their material in the same way photographers use watermarks, Davis said.


“Digital watermarking — and, in particular, the innovations described in this newly issued patent — can be an important element of building long-term viable business models from the disruptive changes in entertainment distribution and consumption that have evolved, as embodied most strikingly in social networking sites,” Davis said.

****************************

But Fisher cautioned, the system is best suited for sites such as YouTube rather than file-sharing sites because the application scans public webpages, not P2P networks.

The patent is entitled, “Method For Monitoring Internet Dissemination Of Image, Video and/or Audio Files.”

From XBiz News - Full article here.

What do you guys think about this? Could this new technology be adapted for the adult industry? Or do you think some hacker will come along and be able to disable it? And really, are sites like adult versions of YouTube and porn blogs using full unauthorized videos more or less dangerous than P2P networks?

This is great. Sounds like an outgrowth of their already existing technology for still content.

We've used the Digimarc invisible adult content watermark for about 2 years now on our stills. We don't subscribe to the tracking service, but we can, if we run across a still image, identify it as coming from us (the copyright notice and our registration number is embedded, along with the adult content marker.)

I'm delighted to see they are extending this to video, though I hope they will offer a simple and inexpensive embedding tool or plugin rather than making people buy a large and expensive software package designed to do something else.

I wonder if this is similar to the technology that Titan have been utilizing for the past few years on their content?

Regards,

Lee

I'll second that idea of a nice cheap plugin or addon ... for us cheapies like me.. :worm:

Yeah, instead of making you build it into the encoding, therefore making you reencode all of your existing video to add it. That would be very costly and time consuming.

From what I am hearing it is actually part of the mastering and editing of the film. "Taggents" are added to the actual film that are invisable to the naked eye, but can be read by filtering software. The taggents are randomly dispersed throughout the viewing frame so they essentially cannot be blocked by hackers.

Since they are part of the mastered film they cannot be removed from the file, even with re-encoding. What this does is tell the base website like Youtube who the original owner of the content is. If clips are submitted that have the mark they would then verify that the person submititng the file does in fact have the license to distribute the film.

This is very different then the system we are currently using. But, we would be happy to use this type of invisable watermarking if they can prove it cannot be hacked and removed. The reason we stopped using Digimarc on our DVD's was it was so easily hacked and removed. Why pay the per unit licesning fee if it can be hacked in 3 mins with a free piece of shareware??