Digimarc, Hitachi, Macrovision, NEC, Philips Electronics, Pioneer and Sonythis week said they are forming the Video Watermarking Group to give film studios means to distribute content online without the fear of potentialcopyright pirates.
Digital security has been heating up, with many high-tech companies workingto devise schemes for embedding digital watermarks within audio and images,such as print or film. Such watermarking technology places a unique bit ofdigital code into a file that is theoretically difficult to remove withoutdamaging 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. "Thequestion (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 couldcreate a watermark that would be secure."
Such technology has been in the spotlight this week, with music industrygroup Secure Digital Music Initiative threatening legal action against a team ofresearchers that successfully cracked four watermark schemes and planned to publish their results at a conference Thursday. Although a paperdescribing 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 digitalformats. Hackers have cracked the previous standard with a code known asDeCSS, spawning a series of lawsuits aimed at keeping the DVD circumventioncode off the Internet.
The DeCSS code was designed to help people play DVDs on Linux machines, butit could theoretically be used to copy DVDs. In the most high-profile DeCSScase, a federal judge ruledlast year that the online hacker magazine 2600 violated copyright lawmerely by posting and linking to the code. The case, however, is being appealed to a higher court; oral arguments are scheduled May 1 in the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals inNew York.
E.K. Ranjit, chief financial officer for Portland, Ore.-based Digimarc,said the Video Watermarking Group was formed to create a standard thatwould be used by the motion picture industry. He said the group merged twoother groups, Galaxy and Millennium, that have been working on digitalwatermarking for a couple of years.
"Watermarking technology is generally regarded as an essential componentfor preventing unauthorized copying," Ranjit said. "This is a very key technology for the next generation of things to come."
Lock down on tunes
Such technology has been a controversial approach for protecting content inthe music industry. The SDMI group, which includes technology, hardware andmusic companies, has been working on a way to use watermarks in recordedmusic for several years.
Questions about the technology's ability to effectively protect against copying, and about interference with the quality of digital files, havehelped delay these efforts considerably, however.
Many technologists say watermarking is better suited to tracking contentthan it is to protecting against reproduction. Unlike encryption, whichscrambles a file unless someone has a "key" to unlock the process,watermarking does not intrinsically prevent use of a file. Instead itrequires any player--a DVD machine or MP3player, for example--to have instructions built in that can read watermarksand accept only correctly marked files.
Hardware manufacturers have traditionally been skeptical of this kind ofapproach, because of the need to be able to play back CDs or DVDs that werecreated without watermarks included. Critics of the approach also say it isnot difficult to strip out watermarks, making files appear as though they lack protection.
As watermarking builds tension between academics and the music industry, itremains to be seen whether it will be a feasible copy protection method forthe film industry.
The Video Watermarking Group "may be able to provide a unified solution toalleviate the movie industry's fears," said P.J. McNealy, an analyst atresearch company Gartner. But, "it comes back to the fundamental issue thatthe copyright holders still hold the keys here. It's copyright holders whowill dictate what the security measures are for their materials."
News.com's John Borland contributed to this report.