Five Companies In Digital Watermark Agreement
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Five leading computer and consumer electronics companies - Hitachi Ltd (NYSE:HIT - news), IBM Corp., NEC Corp. (Nasdaq:NIPNY - news), Pioneer Electronic Corp. (NYSE:PIO - news) and Sony Corp (NYSE:SNE - news) - said Tuesday they agreed to a means to create copyright protections for reproduced digital movies and videos.
The companies said they agreed to using ''digital watermark technology,'' an invisible mark on the picture itself, which indicates whether the video may be copied or not, depending on the copyright. The watermark could also allow for a single copy, which is not provided for in current analog tapes of copyrighted movies.
''What we've developed is a means to mark most pictures in the picture itself,'' said Dan Sullivan, an IBM vice president. ''Part of the data in the mark is copy control information. It either says it is copyrighted, so do not copy, copy it once, or copy as many times as you like.''
Current read-only DVD, or digital versatile disk, systems prevent unauthorized copying from pre-recorded DVD disks by systems like the digital ''content-scrambling system'' to encrypt and play back movies.
But with new digital recording equipment such as recordable DVDs, digital tape recorders and personal computers with large storage capacity, company's want additional copy-protection features to prevent unauthorized copies of the copyrighted digital content.
The five companies expect the first significant application of the new technology to be in DVD. Digital watermarks are also expected to be used in the copy protection of content distributed electronically via digital broadcasts.
The five companies were among 11 that in 1997 began to propose watermark solutions to an ad hoc group of experts from computer, consumer-electronics and movie-studio industries to assess competing copy-protection proposals for movies, video and other content on digital media.
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