Intellectual property protection systems and digital watermarking

Abstract. Adequate protection of digital copies of multimedia content – both audio and video – is a prerequisite to the distribution of this content over net-works. Until recently digital audio and video content has been protected by its size: it is difficult to distribute and store without compression. Modern com-pression algorithms allow substantial bitrate reduction while maintaining high-fidelity reproduction. If distribution of these algorithms is controlled, cleartext uncompressed content is still protected by its size. However, once the compres-sion algorithms are generally available cleartext content becomes extremely vulnerable to piracy. In this paper we explore the implications of this vulner-ability and discuss the use of compression and watermarking in the control of piracy.