Today, the biggest threat to the multimedia industry remains professional piracy of packaged media. Since every CD or DVD disc manufactured represents a perfect replica of the master copy, content owners are currently unable to determine whether a selected copy is authentic or has been illegally duplicated. Also, with the anticipated future success of electronic content
distribution, content owners need a way to establish ownership over each digital copy. Blue Spike’s secure forensic watermarks allow both packaged media and digital downloads to be easily authenticated.

A Giovanni forensic watermark is embedded into a signal, providing information on its owner and its origin. Giovanni's forensic watermarks are integrated and repeated at random locations within the content, making it difficult for potential pirates to detect and ultimately alter or remove.

That essential functionality provides enormous power to the creators and their distributors who want to keep their customers and channel partners honest. A forensic watermark used in a digital download can uniquely identify content's authorized user, providing a powerful disincentive to casual, pass-along piracy. More importantly in its commercial aspects, the content owner can use a secure forensic watermark to verify that content was distributed by the appropriate channel and delivered to the proper destination.

The same analysis for application of digital watermarking or similar applied steganographic techniques enables uniqueness to be attributed to software applications, documents and value-added information outside of the entertainment and media industries. Medical information, insurance documents, evidence in legal proceedings, all represent important verticals for the application of Blue Spike's Giovanni forensic watermarks.