Digital Watermarking for Digital Rights Management

With the remarkable growth of Internet and multimedia applications, production and distribution of digital media has become exceedingly easy and affordable. Applications such as distance education, e-commerce, telemedicine, digital library, and live audio/video broadcast activities require distribution and sharing of digital multimedia contents. Consequently, maintaining the quality of service of the applications and the rights of the content owner as well as enforcing a viable business model among the producer, consumer, and distributor of digital contents has become an increasingly challenging task, leading to a contentious area called digital rights management (DRM). This chapter presents how digital watermarking (DWM) technology can addresses part of this DRM problem of secure distribution of digital contents.