Testing Your Digital Watermark
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The ease of saving images off of the web has caused a very
real problem for artists and content providers alike. If
you have placed your intellectual property on the web chances
are that sooner or later someone is going to 'borrow' a little
bit of it... without your permission.
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Now that we're all excited about the concept
of digital watermarking we
need to make a return to reality. These programs are
not fool-proof and can in fact be over-ridden quite
easily.
Simply re-sizing an image will effectively render the
digital mark unreadable and therefore useless.
Several software packages can be used to alter digitally
embedded watermarks as well.
StirMark, written by
Markus G. Kuhn, and available for download from the Weakness of Existing Watermarking Schemes
page of Fabien Petitcolas
of Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, will remove most of the watermarks
of most commercial products.
unZine available for both
linux and Windows 95 will remove the signature from a digitally copyrighted
image. Several copyrighted and altered images are
available from the
unZine website, demonstrating the effectiveness of their product.
2Mosaic 0.1
for Microsoft Windows 95/NT, written by Fabien Petitcolas
will take a JPG and divide it into several smaller images, as well as create
the appropriate HTML that will re-join the separate images into the full-sized
single image on a web page. The individual peaces of the original image are smaller
than the minimal required size necessary for a watermarking crawler such as that
offered by Digimarc.
These programs are not offered as a means of destroying someone else's copyright mark, but
rather as a means to test the marking software in an effort to give you
the most secure means possible for protecting your work.
Additional Reading
Weakness of Existing Watermarking Schemes
Watermark Testing: Is Your Watermark Secure?
Software Protection
Purloining and Pilfering
Web Guard - Working Together
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