Secure Multimedia Authoring with Dishonest Collaborators

Abstract

Many systems have been proposed for protecting the intellectual property of multimedia authors and owners from the public at large, who have access to the multimedia only after it is published. In this paper, we consider the problem of protecting authors' intellectual property rights from insiders, such as collaborating authors and producers, who interact with the creative process before publication. We describe the weaknesses of standard proof-of-ownership watermarking approaches against dishonest insiders and propose several possible architectures for systems that avoid these weaknesses. We further show how these architectures can be adapted for fingerprinting in the presence of dishonest insiders.