A Watermarking System for Teaching Students to Respect Intellectual Property Rights

Our work proposes a watermarking system for supporting the teaching process for educating students to respect intellectual property rights. In particular, we propose an educational tool, which we named WaterIP, that can be efficiently used by students to enable them to perceive how to protect their own ideas and how to respect others’ intellectual property. Our system uses an efficient technique for watermarking images by exploiting certain properties of a specific 2D representation of permutations, it has a friendly graphical user interface and shows interesting performance figures. The system provides students with two main working levels: (I) the student creates a secret key, i.e., the watermark, and embeds it into his own image, and (II) he makes the marks of a watermarked image visible in order to later extract the watermark from it using only, for pedagogical reasons, a ruler and a pencil. The watermarking method behind WaterIP can be applied to all educational levels beginning from early childhood up to preliminary and high schools. We demonstrate the educational effectiveness of our WaterIP system by presenting ways of how it can be applied in class and show that WaterIP helps to understand what intellectual property rights really stand for.