A Copyright Protection Environment for Digital Images

This paper* presents a new approach for the copyright protection of digital images transmitted over the Internet. Current watermark techniques emphasise the robustness of digital watermarks only. In addition to being robust, our approach uses cryptographic protocols and public key techniques to ensure the legal binding of spread spectrum based watermark methods. Our approach allows legal action even if a watermark is not found because ownership is legally registered. We show that the copyright problem can be reduced in its complexity if the copyright verification process is associated with the consumer side of the commercial digital image distribution process.