WATERMARKING SCHEMES AND PROTOCOLS FOR PROTECTING RIGHTFUL OWNERSHIP AND CUSTOMERS RIGHTS

Various digital watermarking techniques have been proposed in recent y ears as methods to protect the copyright of multimedia data. However, as pointed out by Craver et al., the rightful ownership problem has no t been properly solved. Currently, there are two proposals to solve th e 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: res olution of the rightful ownership problem and protection of the custom er's rights problem. For the rightful ownership problem, we develop wa termarking methods which successfully resolve the ownership of waterma rked 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 rightf ul ownership is guaranteed. Furthermore, we design customer rights pro tocols which give legal customers the ability to create their own evid ence and prove their legitimate rights to use the watermarked multimed ia data. The integration of our watermarking schemes with the customer 's rights protocols creates a robust framework toward resolving rightf ul ownership and protecting customer's rights. (C) 1998 Academic Press