The Rationale for Digital Watermarking Digital watermarking serves two main purposes which do not mutually exclude one another. The technology of digital watermarking has quickly become a respected concept for the solution of copyright protection problems in the global digital network. Each copy is exactly identical to the original, there is no loss of quality as in the case of analog copies.
Redistribution is virtually impossible to control.
Even if an unauthorized distributor can be localized, he will be outside the legal grasp of the legitimate owner of the multimedia data or can just as easily move to another virtual location. All copy protection schemes endorsed by the media industries so far have been broken. One of the central benefits of digital watermarking over other content protection schemes is that it is not restricted to protecting the digital representation. It is also important to note that a digital watermark used in copyright protection must be secret since any public marking can be removed in a much simpler fashion than its secret counterpart and also carries a grave danger of misuse by false labeling. Labeling Another application besides copyright protection is in the labeling of multimedia data.