Why watermarking is nonsense

The ease with which early watermarking algorithms were broken has given rise to a new set of schemes that are usually robust to a wide variety of attacks. We argue that this has created an illusion of progress, when in reality there is none. Most published watermarking algorithms, like their predecessors, protect all objects in a neighborhood surrounding the marked object. We point out that while this is necessary, it is very far from being sufficient. To withstand adversarial attack, a watermarking scheme would have to protect all valuable variations of an object, not merely ones that are close to it.