The technology developed for this project is designed to deliver protected MPEG video and audio on the Internet. However, our encryption, perceptual scrambling, and watermarking methods can be extended to stand-alone systems.
Technology can play a major role in providing infrastructure for content protection.
Data encryption and scrambling are means of assuring revenue is collected. Watermarking can be used for copyright protection and finger printing, which identifies the recipient. Content providers will be more willing to distribute their material on the Internet if they are assured that it will have copyright protection and that they will be properly compensated. One avenue we are pursuing to transfer our watermarking method is a proposal for use in MPEG4. Multi-level content protection provides different qualities of content that can be played depending on the authorization of the requestor.