As digital content continues to proliferate and be distributed across social networks and peer-to-peer (P2P) environments on the Internet, identifying and managing copyrighted assets and related goods and services is becoming an increasing challenge. The problem is compounded by the fact that digital works can easily lose their identifying information during the distribution process, digital-to-analog conversion, or routine file format changes. Digital watermarking provides identifying and linking capabilities in an unobtrusive, persistent, format-independent fashion – giving images, movies, music or other digital content a digital identity that can help better manage content and associated rights and connect users to valuable information, relationships, and goods and services associated with the content.

Better identification of entertainment content on social networking sites such as YouTube and MySpace could enhance the consumer experience and improve marketing effectiveness, while protecting copyrights. The growing number of delivery options for digital media is enabling entertainment producers to increasingly package goods and services with entertainment content to enhance the value to consumers and improve profit margins. Digital watermarking has been used for many years to help track and manage commercial photographs on the Internet as a means to protect copyrights and enhance the licensing of those properties. More recently, digital watermarking has been widely adopted as an improved means of television broadcast monitoring and audience measurement. Various entertainment industry standards for leading-edge media innovations contemplate the use of digital watermarking, including digital cinema and high definition DVD.

“Social networking based on sharing entertainment content is a booming phenomenon that is plagued by the fact that media content can easily lose its identifying information when shared across these networks, creating ‘orphan works’ whose copyrights and ownership is unknown to users and not easily identified,” said Reed Stager, executive vice president, Digimarc. Stager continued, “Images, music and movies need to be easily identified to provide enhanced consumer experiences and ensure appropriate use of copyrighted media. Digital watermarking is a promising and effective means to persistently identify entertainment content and enable new distribution models and enhanced consumer experiences.”

Several other recently issued Digimarc patents propose improved means of identifying and managing media content, including:

• Associating images with metadata using watermarks; U.S. Number 7,010,144
• Linking to multiple databases by layering watermarks in content; U.S. Number 7,020,304
• Linking content with usage rights; U.S. Number 7,035,427
• Embedding object identifiers in media objects compatible with object identification standards; U.S. Number 7,044,395
• Creating interactive video objects by associating video with actions using watermarks; U.S. Number 7,050,603
• Linking documents to on-line data; U.S. Number 7,051,086
• Linking graphical images to the Internet; U.S. Number 7,058,697
• Managing relationships among related content using watermarks; U.S. Number 7,098,931
• Distributed systems for registering watermarked content and responding to requests triggered by watermark detection; U.S. Number 7,111,170

Digimarc licenses its extensive portfolio of digital watermarking-related patents and technology to the media and entertainment and other industries in support of a wide range of applications. Digimarc and its licensees have enabled the watermarking of billions of media objects around the world and deployed hundreds of millions of watermark readers in professional and consumer software applications and hardware devices. Digimarc has an active licensing program to foster use of the innovations covered in these patents. For more information on digital watermarking or Digimarc’s licensing program, please contact This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it '; document.write( '' ); document.write( addy_text575 ); document.write( '<\/a>' ); //-->\n This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it

Digimarc is also a founding member of the Digital Watermarking Alliance, an international group of industry leading companies that was recently formed to promote the value of digital watermarking to content owners, industry, policy makers and consumers (please visit www.digitalwatermarkingalliance.org ).

About Digimarc

Digimarc Corporation (NASDAQ: DMRC), based in Beaverton, Oregon, is a leading supplier of secure identity and media management solutions. Digimarc provides products and services that enable the annual production of more than 60 million personal identification documents, including two-thirds of U.S. driver licenses and IDs for more than 20 countries. Digimarc's digital watermarking technology provides a persistent digital identity for various media content and is used to enhance the security of financial documents, identity documents and digital images, and support other media rights management applications.

Digimarc has an extensive intellectual property portfolio, with more than 285 issued U.S. patents with more than 5,000 claims, and more than 400 pending patent applications in digital watermarking, personal identification and related technologies.

The Company is headquartered in Beaverton, Oregon, with other U.S. offices in Burlington, Massachusetts; Fort Wayne, Indiana; and the Washington DC area; and international offices in London and Mexico. Please go to www.digimarc.com for more Company information.