Giovanni's Applied Digital Watermarking Schemes

Giovanni's Applied Digital Watermarking Schemes

Blue Spike has developed three different types of watermarks each having their own utility in protecting copyrights and serving customers:

Forensic Watermark
Prevents professional piracy and tracks the movement and usage of content.

Robust Open Watermark
Prevents consumer piracy and provides usage control watermarks that are read and interpreted by next generation of digital media devices.

Secure Channel
An attachment that provides an omnibus vehicle to deliver data like liner notes and "cover art" and HTML links to consumers.

Giovanni: Built to Endure Casual Abuse and Hostile Attack

Giovanni was developed to survive the real world's challenges. Giovanni's watermarks will survive some of the most severe compression systems and all the common consumer-grade signal manipulations like digital to analogue conversion and even the intrusions of the most skilled hackers.

First, the digital watermarks enable "tamperproofing". They do this by actually binding or concatenating signature bits into a digital signal. If any part of that signal is disturbed, the signature doesn't read out correctly when it is decoded. Additionally, given that the watermark is placed in virtually random locations, professional pirates would have to destroy the signal or commit enormous resources to searching it out - still with no guarantee they had located its every position.

The keying system does more than just give the copyright holder the means to unlock the watermark from the signal.

It undergoes a number of transformations in the encoding process that gives it intelligence about the placement of the watermark and the characteristics of the signal itself. Blue Spike has devised a number of counter-hacking tools that can be employed to recover a watermark even in severely hacked and manipulated media files.

See the Architectural Advantages of Giovanni's Digital Watermarking Approach.

The system's architecture, by design, offers a good deal of power in resisting incidental and deliberate attacks.

Giovanni’s watermarking technology is considered to be effective because of its robust architecture. There are three distinguishing characteristics that are vital to the overall digital watermarking architecture, ones by which all should be judged: security, imperceptibility and robustness. Without these three central ingredients complementing each other, a trustworthy digital watermarking application cannot exist. Giovanni alone possesses them all at once. As follows:

Security
How can a digital watermarking application provide content owners with copyright protection if the underlying technology is not provably secure? If, for example, a song is watermarked but no one can prove that the watermark is authentic, then the watermark has little authority in establishing ownership. Giovanni’s watermarking technology uses cryptographic keys to keep the watermark perceptually invisible to everyone - except the authorized copyright holder. What can't be seen or heard can't be attacked.

Imperceptibility
Blue Spike’s technology makes use of a sophisticated psycho-acoustic model, which identifies the most perceptually significant areas of the content for a watermark to be placed. This approach enables Giovanni’s watermarks to be embedded inaudibly, invisibly, and in such a way that, if removed, the signals that have been watermarked are likely to be damaged.

Robustness
The third important element in a digital watermark system is the watermark’s robustness or strength against certain signal manipulations. It is common practice for certain signal manipulations, such as compression (the transformation of a CD to an MP3 file), to effectively destroy watermarks on competing systems. Giovanni's design gives the highest assurance of the watermark's survival and, in the event of attack, gives the most powerful tools for recovering watermarks in even the most abused signal.

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