BizAims

Online content distribution businesses require methods to protect the intellectual property of distributed content.Intellectual property protection is a mechanism to protect the rights of ownership of original work so that no one can use the rights-protected work in any way without seeking permission for the use and, if necessary, paying the rights owners a royalty for the use. Digital watermarking is the core technology in electronic rights protection. However, research addressing the concerns of businesses about intellectual property protection schemes through watermarking is scarce. In this paper, we address these concerns by first introducing watermark design patterns (WDPs) for electronic commerce applications, then presenting problems of copyright protection using watermarking, and finally presenting management concerns. A WDP is defined as the requirements of a digital watermark for a particular type of distributed media content under the protection of its intellectual property. This paper introduces four WDPs for four types of media data - video, image, audio, and text and they are denoted as WDPvideo, WDPimage, WDPaudio and WDPtext respectively. The four WDPs are derived from the characteristics of watermarking techniques and the properties of a distributor’s web site. In our study, the proposed WDPs are used to relate the digital watermarking techniques to electronic commerce applications, and their relationships are presented graphically. The relationship diagram can facilitate electronic commerce application developers to select appropriate digital watermarking techniques and off-the-shelf systems for intellectual property protection on their web sites.

With advancements in Internet technologies and increasing demands on online multimedia businesses, digital copyright has become a major concern for businesses that engage in online content distribution through various business models, such as pay-per-view, subscription, trading, and so on. This is because a perfect copy of the distributed content can be reproduced at close-to-zero cost. Losses due to copyright infringement have increased dramatically. Intellectual property protection is a pressing concern for content owners who are exhibiting digital representations of photographs, rare books and manuscripts, and original artworks on the World Wide Web. Electronic commerce web sites or applications include electronic publishing and advertisement, real-time information delivery, product ordering, transaction processing, photograph galleries, digital libraries, web newspapers and magazines, network video and audio, personal communication and so on. In electronic commerce web sites or applications, digital contents can be categorized into four basic types of media data, and they are image, audio, video and text. Multimedia data will not be included in this paper, as this is considered to be a combination of these basic data types.

Watermarking is viewed as an enabling technology to protect these media data from re-use without giving adequate credit to the source or in an unauthorized way. In general, a watermarking enables ownership assertion, fingerprinting, authentication and integrity verification, content labeling, usage control and content protection. Hawkins addressed that many watermarking techniques have been proposed for intellectual property and copyright protection in the literature, but different media data apply different digital watermarking techniques. Moreover, technical requirements of different watermarking techniques also vary because of different functions and applications. Since intellectual property protection using digital watermarking is still at its infancy, this paper attempts to promote digital watermarking and introduces a mechanism for electronic business designers and developers to use watermarking in protecting their online media contents. In response to this need, this paper first introduces four watermark design patterns (WDPs) to describe the requirements of digital watermarks for various media contents.

The proposal of these WDP is based on the characteristics of watermarking techniques addressed in the literature, and the properties of a distributor’s web sites. The WDPs are then extended to relate the watermarking techniques to various electronic commerce applications. The graphical representation of the relation diagram could guide the developers to select appropriate watermarking for the protection of their distributed contents. Problems of copyright protection using watermarking and management issues are also presented.

The entertainment industry has been testing a wide range of technologies that allow the multimedia industry to retain copyright controls provided by laws and to harness the power of the Internet to increase the size of the Journal of Electronic Commerce Research, industry and to enhance the experience of consumers. Foremost among these technologies are cryptographic-based and watermark-based copyright protection schemes. In cryptographic-based copyright protection, digital contents are always distributed in their encrypted forms. Given proper permission from the content provider or owner, clients are allowed to access the encrypted contents.

However, when a piece of encrypted digital content is decrypted, it becomes ordinary digital content that is no longer protected and carries no copyright information. As a result, when the decrypted digital content is distributed to unauthorized consumers illegally, it is almost impossible for the cryptographic-based copyright management system to trace the person who has distributed the illegal copy of the digital content or to discover from where it actually came. To address this problem, many systems achieve copyright protection by attaching a code or a tag represented in a digital watermark that uniquely identifies both the creator and the consumer of the digital content. A digital watermark is digital data that can be embedded in digital contents and it allows one to establish ownership, identify a buyer, or add additional information about the digital content.