New White Paper: Why Watermarking is Not Enough
How blockchain technology can be used to stop online piracy
Movies, ebooks, software — all are distributed using a paradigm from the 20th century: that the creator has, for the greater part, control over who receives their content, and that unlicensed duplication and distribution is difficult and rare enough to be managed. We are still treating digital good like physical goods, including how we try to protect them.
However, in the 21st century, this concept is dangerously outdated. Sensitive and valuable digital assets are copied with impunity and distributed globally. Media creators have little recourse once files are shared on the internet, because the prolific sharing happens largely anonymously, and often outside jurisdictions where owners can enforce media rights.
In this new white paper, experts in forensic watermarking, piracy economics, and blockchain technology at Custos analyze:
- the global scale of digital piracy;
- the strengths and weaknesses of various anti-piracy tools and tactics;
- the taxonomy of media identification methods such as fingerprinting and forensic watermarking;
- the limitations of traditional digital rights management (DRM); and
- why the future of intellectual property protection is in decentralised leak detection.
