Digimarc, Hitachi, Macrovision, NEC, Philips Electronics, Pioneer and Sony this week said they are forming the Video Watermarking Group to give film studios means to distribute content online without the fear of potential copyright pirates.
Digital security has been heating up, with many high-tech companies working to devise schemes for embedding digital watermarks within audio and images, such as print or film. Such watermarking technology places a unique bit of digital code into a file that is theoretically difficult to remove without damaging the quality of the sound or image.
"Hollywood studios would love to see watermarking develop," said Eric Scheirer, analyst at technology research company Forrester Research. "The question (that) still remains is whether any kind of security system that depends on obscurity for keeping things secure could really work. And there (are) many people who claim that it can...Time will tell whether they could create a watermark that would be secure."
Such technology has been in the spotlight this week, with music industry group Secure Digital Music Initiative threatening legal action against a team of researchers that successfully cracked four watermark schemes and planned to publish their results at a conference Thursday. Although a paper describing their work has been posted on the Internet, the team backed off from the conference plans, citing potential liability.
The move to create watermark technology for videos also comes as Hollywood is looking to beef up its copy-protection scheme for DVDs and other digital formats. Hackers have cracked the previous standard with a code known as DeCSS, spawning a series of lawsuits aimed at keeping the DVD circumvention code off the Internet.
The DeCSS code was designed to help people play DVDs on Linux machines, but it could theoretically be used to copy DVDs. In the most high-profile DeCSS case, a federal judge ruled last year that the online hacker magazine 2600 violated copyright law merely by posting and linking to the code. The case, however, is being appealed to a higher court.
E.K. Ranjit, chief financial officer for Digimarc, said the Video Watermarking Group was formed to create a standard that would be used by the motion picture industry. He said the group merged two other groups, Galaxy and Millennium, that have been working on digital watermarking for a couple of years.
"Watermarking technology is generally regarded as an essential component for preventing unauthorised copying," Ranjit said. "This is a very key technology for the next generation of things to come."
