Watermarking-based copyright protection of Internet-delivered multimedia

Watermarking has been invoked as a tool for the protection of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) of multimedia data distributed in digital form. The most important issues to be considered when designing a watermarking-based Electronic Copyright Management System (ECMS) are discussed, and a new system is presented which exploits state-of-the-art watermarking technology to enable IPR protection in open-network environments. The proposed system is an object-oriented one: at any given time, the information needed to prove the legal/illegal use of the data is hidden within the data itself, whereas no attempt is made to trace previous abuses.