Quick Facts

Quick facts about the Digital Watermarking Alliance.

1.) What is the Digital Watermarking Alliance (DWA)?
The Digital Watermarking Alliance (DWA) is a group of organizations that share a common interest in furthering the adoption of digital watermarking and which are actively involved in commercialization of digital watermarking-based technology, applications, systems and services. Members service a broad range of industries around the world.

2.) What is the DWA's mission?
The mission of the DWA is to create awareness and promote the value of digital watermarking to content owners, industry, policy makers, and consumers.

3.) Who is involved with the DWA?
The Digital Watermarking Alliance is made up of 15 organizations that are successfully delivering digital watermarking technology and solutions to various markets, including media and entertainment, state and national governments, mobile communications and other commercial markets. Members include: AquaMobile, Civolution, DataMark Technologies, Digimarc (Nasdaq: DMRC), Gibson, ISAN-IA, MarkAny, MediaGrid, Media Sciences International, Streamburst, Thomson (Euronext 18453; NYSE: TMS), Université Catholique de Louvain, Verance, Verimatrix, and Widevine Technologies.

Return to Top

4.) What is digital watermarking?
Digital watermarking is the process by which identifying data is woven into media content such as images, printed materials, movies, music or TV programming, giving those objects a unique, digital identity that can be used for a variety of valuable applications. Imperceptible to the human senses yet easily recognized by special software detectors, a digital watermark remains constant even through recording, manipulation and editing, compression and decompression, encryption, decryption and broadcast - without affecting the quality of the content.

Digital watermarking can enable content identification and copyright communication on a broad scale and can provide a range of solutions for identifying, securing, managing and tracking digital images, audio, video, and printed materials. In fact, digital watermarking technology has already been adopted by many photographers, movie studios, record labels, television broadcasters, and corporate enterprises. These industries use digital watermarking to identify, protect and manage the rights to their content as they embrace innovative distribution or business models and provide consumers with new entertainment experiences, enhanced convenience, and greater portability of their media content.

Digital watermarks can identify copyrighted content and associated rights, during and after distribution, to determine copyright ownership and enable rights management policy while enabling innovative new content distribution and usage models.

5.) Where is digital watermarking used today?
Digital watermarks are broadly deployed with billions of watermarked objects and hundreds of millions of watermark detectors in the market, supporting various applications. The technology helps:

Broadcasters track, verify and measure TV programming and advertising
Movie and music studios deter piracy of movies, music and DVDs used in the Academy Award Screener program. It is also used to secure the distribution of digital cinema content
Central banks deter digital counterfeiting of banknotes
Photographers identify and manage image copyrights
Federal, State and international government organizations authenticate IDs presented as proof of identity, and deter identity theft, fraud and document counterfeiting

6.) What key policies or issues could be supported by digital watermarking

In 2005, the U.S. Copyright Office embarked on a study of the issues raised by "orphan works" — copyrighted works whose owners may be impossible to identify and locate. Typically, such works are excerpts or newly digitized versions of books, movies, photos, and music whose ownership information has been stripped away or lost during distribution, re-formatting or editing. A digital watermark embedded within a piece of content can carry a persistent copyright owner identifier that can be linked to information about the content owner and copyright information in an associated database or to appropriate usage rules and billing information.
Congress's "analog hole" legislation is also known as the Digital Transition Content Security Act of 2005. This legislation is designed to plug the "analog hole," the problem whereby the rights associated with creative works such as movies or TV shows are lost or removed during analog-to-digital conversion or consumption of that content. The bill effectively proposes the rights assertion mark (a form of digital watermarking) be used as a form of content protection.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios v. Grokster identified digital watermarking as a technology that can be used by rights holders and file-sharing networks to deter piracy and illegal use of copyrighted entertainment content.
Distributed Computing Industry Association's (DCIA) P2P Digital Watermarking Working Group was recently formed to advocate for the use digital watermarking as an effective tool for identifying copyrighted entertainment content, including music, movies and images, for the purpose of deterring copyright infringement.