IPR Protection for Digital Media Distribution: Trends and Solutions in the E-Business Domain

Copyright protection is becoming an important issue for organizations that create, use, and distribute digital content through e-commerce channels. As online corruption increases, new technical and business requirements are posed for protecting intellectual property rights such as watermarking, use of metadata, self-protection, and self-authentication. This work is a review of the most important of these methods and analyzes their potential use in digital rights management systems. We focus especially on watermarking and argue that it has a true potential in e-business because it is possible to embed and detect multiple watermarks to a single digital artifact without decreasing its quality. In conjunction with parallel linking of content to metadata, there is true potential for real life copyright-protection systems.