Technical trials and legal tribulations

Title page of Gasparis Schotti's Schola Steganographica (Lessons in Steganography), 1687, one of the earliest books on data hiding. In recent years, research efforts on digital water-marking 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. Different applications may have different requirements and performance-evaluation criteria, and the engineering solutions are often complicated. Fortunately , we have also seen steady progress in engineering better and more robust water-marking solutions. Digital watermarking embeds (usually imperceptible but always unobtrusive) labels in digital content, usually for the purpose of communicating copyright and ownership information. Other applications include but are not limited to annotation of images and audio and video clips; detection of images that have been tampered with but were previously watermarked to provide tamper resistance ; and indelible fingerprints that allow the tracing of the original recipients of data should piracy be detected later. These engineering efforts and research activities have focused on the engineering issues of robust-ness in watermarking techniques. However, as demonstrated recently [2, 3, 6], robustness alone does not guarantee a watermarking technique will provide content protection as promised. If we fail to look carefully at digital watermark-ing, analyzing it from the utilization per-spective—beyond the merely technical merits of inserting and extracting invisible marks in engineering the necessary robustness—watermarking technologies can be defeated easily and rendered ineffective. Moreover, promising unrealistic capabilities, underachieving due to technical hurdles, and underestimating the strength and cleverness of attacks on watermarks (as evident in some com-We can identify and counter watermark attackers. But once in a court of law, even a digital watermark can be inadequate. 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. Digital watermarking technology is viewed as an enabling agent allowing more widespread sharing and use of that content while decreasing worry over piracy. h mercial watermarking products and technical publications) may eventually cause the public to lose confidence in the technology. On the other hand, understanding the limitations and inadequacies of watermarking schemes paves the way toward engineering more comprehensive and effective solutions in the …