Database watermarking for copyright protection

Abstract

As increasing amounts of data are produced, packaged and delivered in digital form, in a fast, networked environment, one of its main features threatens to become its worst enemy: zero-cost verbatim copies. The ability to produce duplicates of digital Works at almost no cost can now be misused for illicit profit. This mandates mechanisms for effective rights assessment and protection. One such mechanism is based on Information Hiding. By concealing a resilient rights holder identity signature (watermark) within the digital Work(s) to be protected, Information Hiding for Rights Assessment (Watermarking) enables ulterior court-time proofs associating particular Works with their respective rights holders. One main challenge is the fact that altering the Work in the process of hiding information could possibly destroy its value. At the same time one has to be concerned with a malicious adversary, with major incentives to remove or alter the watermark beyond detection - thus disabling the ability for court-time proofs - without destroying the value of the Work - to preserve its potential for illicit profit. In this chapter we explore how Information Hiding can be deployed as an effective tool for Rights Assessment for discrete digital data. More specifically, we discuss numeric and categorical relational data. © 2008 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.