Digital Watermarking

8 Pages 1981 Words

tion about an image in order to reduce copyright infringement. Digital images are especially prone to loss of authorship, such as the numerous images posted daily on the World Wide Web, most of which do not reference the photographer or illustrator. Watermarking can trace images in the event of their illicit redistribution. It facilitates the claim of ownership, the receipt of copyright revenues, and serves as reliable evidence in prosecutions. Since, businesses aim to use digital networks to offer digital media for profit digital watermarking is a welcomed tool when dealing with digital copyright protection issues.
As the number of transactions conducted online continue to grow, protecting digital intellectual properties concerns everyone on both a national and international level. The United States Congress is proactively working on ways to deal with digital copyright issues. The Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section launched by the Justice Department provides information about hacking, software piracy, and recent prosecutions (Perry and Scheider 197). On the international level, there is the World Intellectual Property Organization, which promotes and monitors global digital copyright issues.
Mainly, national and international organizations address issues with copy protection and copyright protection of digital property. Copy protection attempts to find ways, to limit the access to copyrighted material and/or inhibit the copy process itself (http://www.watermarkingworld.org). The copy protection mechanism on DVDs is an excellent example. Despite this technology, copy protection is very difficult to achieve in open systems, as recent incidents (like the DVD hack) show. On the other hand copyright protection inserts copyright information into the digital object without a loss of quality. To verify a digital object information is extracted that can lead to the identity of its’ owner. With thi...