Copyright Crusaders

What if you took a really great photograph and posted it to your website, and the next thing you know its on the cover of a magazine and the credit and the money belong to someone else?

Unless you can prove that you took the photo, and youre ready to sue, youre out of luck. But theres hope for you in a technique called content watermarking being researched by the Cryptography Group at Microsoft Research. It imprints the image with a watermark that is not visible to the naked eye, but can be detected by another piece of software. The detection software can be embedded within a spider that crawls all over the World Wide Web and finds all the watermarked images, making sure that no one is displaying them in violation of copyright laws. Similar techniques developed by Microsoft Research Fellow Darko Kirovski and Research Director Henrique Malvar can be used to watermark audio files.

International cryptography researchers, always testing their own work, have developed techniques to remove watermarks. Actually, you dont need a special program to remove a watermark, a combination of effects in most photo editing programs will suffice.

Cryptography researchers Mariusz Jakubowski and Ramarathnam Venkatesan have developed a program that produced watermarks that have survived photo editing techniques and cryptographic attacks designed to remove watermarks. They plan to release it soon, but they also expect to have to improve it as soon as it is released because they have no doubt that the watermark erasers will find a way to defeat it.

Its a never ending duel, sighs Jakubowski. Perhaps someday he will find a way to make a permanent watermark, and artists and publishers everywhere will erect statues in his honor. Then again, maybe hell just have to stay one step ahead of the competition.