Intellectual property protection systems and digital watermarking

Adequate protection of digital copies of multimedia content - both audio an d video - is a prerequisite to the distribution of this content over networ ks. Until recently digital audio and video content has been protected by it s size: it is difficult to distribute and store without compression. Modern compression algorithms allow substantial bitrate reduction while maintaini ng high-fidelity reproduction. If distribution of these algorithms is contr olled, cleartext uncompressed content is still protected by its size. Howev er, once the compression algorithms are generally available cleartext conte nt becomes extremely vulnerable to piracy. In this paper we explore the imp lications of this vulnerability and discuss the use of compression and wate rmarking in the control of piracy. (C) 1998 Optical Society of America.