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To: ~digs who wrote (55)	4/30/2001 5:12:11 AM
From: ~digs	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 6763

More on the Digital Rights Management (DRM) industry: ------------------------------------------ The term 'watermark' may traditionally conjure up images of paper with the faint outline of a marking when held up to the light; however, in this electronic age watermarking has had to be updated to cope with the scope and availability of information, especially on the Web. A new watermark has been developed to protect electronic documents. Images have been protected for some time on the Net, but preserving the originality of text has been a more arduous task, given the ease with which it can be cut and pasted into different formats. Scientists from Purdue University have updated watermarking technology for the electronic age. The practice has been safeguarding the integrity of printed documents for close to 2000 years has now gone digital. Mikhail Atallah, professor of computer science, and Victor Raskin, professor of English, have developed a way to embed a watermark in "natural language" text as well as sensitive electronic documents. Natural language includes all the spoken languages but not languages created for special purposes, such as computer programming. The concept of placing watermarks on electronic documents is not new. Edward Delp, Purdue professor of electrical and computer engineering, was part of a research team that developed the technology in 1998 to watermark images and videos placed on the Web. One of the watermarks his team used is a pattern of black speckles on a white background. The pixels of the watermark are added to, or superimposed on the pixels in the original image. This is done in a sophisticated way so that the typical observer cannot detect. Only a very detailed examination of the pixels would reveal any change. Hidden meaning What makes natural language watermarking unique is that it embeds the watermark in the syntax, or grammatical structure of the language. A future version of the prototype will embed the watermark in the meaning of the language as well. This process has never been done before electronically. "Watermarking text is very, very difficult," says Atallah. "It's much more difficult than watermarking images." One factor making text so difficult to watermark is that, compared to a photographic image, a text document has very few places in which to hide watermarks. "Every pixel in a full-screen image contains information," says Raskin. "There is a lot of redundancy in the image." That redundancy is what makes it possible to embed a watermark. By switching a few blue pixels to red, if a field of blue surrounds the red pixels, the image itself is still seen as blue. However, text documents are obviously different, says Raskin. "In natural language, there is no redundancy. That is, every word means something. If you change it, you change the meaning of the sentence. That's the difficulty." To get around this problem, Atallah and Raskin have developed a way to embed a watermark using the structure of language itself. Natural language watermarking, unlike that used in images, does not embed something physical in the text. Rather, language watermarks introduce very slight changes in the grammatical makeup of selected sentences throughout a document, while keeping the meaning intact. Cryptic code "What we embed is not something you can see," says Raskin, "It's in the invisible syntactic structure." A watermark is introduced throughout a document using an encryption algorithm, or computer instructions, based on a very large prime number. This large number is the "key" one needs to retrieve a watermark. The algorithm selects certain sentences in a document and subtly changes their syntactic structure. For example, a sentence in a document may read:"Ships in the vicinity may provide some additional assistance." After the document has been watermarked, the sentence will read; "Some additional assistance may be provided by the ships in the vicinity." Another factor making this technique difficult to implement is that it must be resistant to change. "We wanted to make our scheme resilient to simple changes in the text that are easy to make by automated processes, such as synonym substitutions," Atallah says. "If you change one word for another throughout the whole document, we would expect the watermark to still be there. It turns out that it's resilient to a lot more than that. It's also resistant to insertions and deletions of sentences." Purdue has filed a patent for the new technology. Possible applications include maintaining the integrity of sensitive documents and detecting whether a document has been tampered with or altered. "My belief is that the large corporations and governments of the world will want to protect their documentation, especially when they see that it can be done cheaply," says Raskin. beyond2000.com --------------------------- Another company involved: NASDAQ:ITRU InterTrust Technologies has developed a general purpose digital rights management (DRM) platform to serve as a foundation for providers of digital information, technology, and commerce services to participate in a global e-commerce system for digital commerce. The Company licenses its DRM platform to partners to build digital commerce services and applications. These partners intend to offer digital commerce services and applications that collectively will form a global commerce system, which the Company has branded as the MetaTrust Utility. The Company maintains the MetaTrust Utility's foundation and will receive as a fee from its partners, a small percentage of the value of goods and services that run through the system. biz.yahoo.com