Giovanni, Making Currency of Bits

Giovanni®, Making Currency of Bits

Understanding the nature of value in commerce of goods and services is highly dependent on an understanding of information.

In ordinary commerce, a creator's capacity to make demands for payment for use of his property extends from his ability to claim ownership of it. As a pivotal infrastructure component for electronic commerce, Blue Spike's digital watermarking technologies speak to fundamental issues like this that are being revisited anew on the Internet. There of course, ownership and licensing of information is complicated by the fact that just about everything online can be copied perfectly with no noticeable difference between a copy and an original.

Blue Spike's Giovanni is the digital watermarking scheme that transforms digital media into objects of value by dint of the fact that ownership can be established for them through the watermark which is, in effect, a digital signature. Paper, by way of comparison, is of relatively little value. Painted with watercolors and signed by the artist it has aesthetic and, depending on the artist, a monetary value. A contract printed on paper - a bond issue or a check - has no value at all until a signature is applied to it and its commitments are endorsed by the signatories.

To effect its signing scheme, Giovanni creates a cryptographically derived fingerprint of the watermark message and, using a discrete key, places bits of that fingerprint in random-seeming places in the signal. The characteristic quality of a "signature" resides in the fact that it is only recoverable by the same key that was used to place the watermark into the signal.

Public key watermarking schemes splitting the embedding key
and the detection or decoding keys is consistent and proprietary to the
patented Giovanni suites of security products and services.

Giovanni was developed to make the digital watermark the equivalent of a digital signature - an authentication instrument that now has standing in law. Blue Spike anticipates the day when an infringement case includes a court sequence in which a digital signature recovered in a song or artwork that has been illegally posted online, an event that has been brought much closer to becoming a reality by the passage of federal digital signature legislation.

As the industry leader in the digital watermarking field, Blue Spike has not stopped at perfecting technologies that have been inspired by its basic research. The company has developed Applied Digital Watermarking Schemes for specific deployment scenarios and for use by different constituencies.

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