Watermarking Schemes and Protocols for Protecting Rightful Ownership and Customer's Rights

Various digital watermarking techniques have been proposed in recent years as methods to protect the copyright of multimedia data. However, as pointed out by Craver et al., the rightful ownership problem has not been properly solved. Currently, there are two proposals to solve the ownership problem. Unfortunately, one proposal lacks a formal proof and the other can be easily defeated. In addition, because the purpose of a watermark is mainly for protecting the original owner's rights, the rights of legitimate customers have not been addressed. This could eventually defeat the goal of using a watermark to protect the owner's copyright. In this paper, we present solutions to both problems: resolution of the rightful ownership problem and protection of the customer's rights problem. For the rightful ownership problem, we develop watermarking methods which successfully resolve the ownership of watermarked MPEG video and/or uncompressed video/image. We introduce specific requirements in the watermark construction algorithm which allow us to prove that the proposed schemes are noninvertible; i.e., the rightful ownership is guaranteed. Furthermore, we design customer rights protocols which give legal customers the ability to create their own evidence and prove their legitimate rights to use the watermarked multimedia data. The integration of our watermarking schemes with the customer's rights protocols creates a robust framework toward resolving rightful ownership and protecting customer's rights.