DRMS: A practical lesson for Cultural Heritage
institutions
Andrea de Polo
c/o Alinari Photo Archive
email: andrea@alinari.it; http://www.alinari.com
Introduction:
Today the world is fulfilled by images. Thanks to the
technological innovations in the communication
sector, television, broadcast programs, satellite
connections, pay-per-view technologies, and fibre
optic communications are getting less expensive and
widely adopted.
In addition to that, with the spread of Internet, data
and content in general such as clip art, movies, still
pictures, soundtracks, ecc. have become much more
accessible.
As everybody know, in the world there are profitcommercial enterprises, and non-profit / educational
institutions. Especially on the Internet, many users
have focused their work to create and use the content
provided on-line by those enterprises / educational
institutions.
For commercial companies, lawyers, end users and
Internet providers, has therefore become quite
difficult to define, manage and verify the intellectual
property rights of what they can find on-line.
Moreover, since the internet is covering the entire
world, very often the regulations and rules of some
countries might be in conflict with others: therefore it
is getting very complicated to manage and clear
copyright over the net, because through several web
mirrors servers , remailer, anonymizers, and strong
encryption keys, it is getting very difficult to identify
the end user or track-down his/her routing. This paper
analyzes some technologies available in the field of
content protection and provide practical information
on some solutions to effectively protect, share and
delivery multimedia content through a trusted and
secure value chain.
Let’s now analyze what DRMS covers and what
solution or technical tools are available today in the
market.
Copyright Management:
In order to protect the copyright holder rights, today
there are many organisations that are working
between the end user and the content provider in
order to clear the rights from copyrighted material
requested by the end user.
Management is taking care by non-profit
organisations like SACD in France, or VCI in the
UK, or SIAE in Italy.
The Visual Creators' Index
The Visual Creators' Index Ltd, or VCI, is an
independent and not-for-profit
Index of 'visual creators' run on behalf of, and for the
benefit of, all creators of
visual images. The VCI management committee is
composed of representatives
from primary UK organisations of visual creators.
The main function of the VCI is to promote and
protect the rights of the creators
of visual images in a digital environment. In
immediate practical terms, the VCI
will investigate and recommend methods of marking
digital images, and will set
up a Register to provide and assign a standard Creator
Code, uniquely
identifying an image creator, for use with these
systems.
The VCI has thus begun the process of setting a
universal standard format for
creator IDs, which image makers throughout the
world, as well as manufacturers
of computer hardware and software, especially other
fingerprinting and
watermarking software, can now begin to support.
There are national organisms of standardisation, like
ANSI for the USA, which agree to the Registration
Authorities in their respective countries, verified by
an international registration authority: JURA, which
depends of the ISO organisation.
ALCS
ALCS was founded in 1977 to enable writers to
receive fees that are uniquely or more effectively
handled collectively. Today it represents more than
35,000 members and associates, and collects and
distributes fees to many more individual writers in
Britain.
ALCS has two main aims:


To campaign where appropriate for the
establishment of collective rights schemes by
statute and voluntary agreement.
To ensure that writers receive a just share from
all such collective rights schemes.
ALCS maintains a watching brief on all matters
affecting copyright, both in Great Britain and abroad,
making representations to UK government authorities
and the European Union. It is increasingly active in
the field of electronic rights, wherein its future lies,
and ALCS Publications on the subject are available.
March Distribution Breaks Records
advantages of becoming a member of the DOI
Foundation, contribute to discussions on policy and
implementation issues, and much more.
Copyright - Collecting Societies (some examples):
ALCS
AIDAA-Association Internationale d'Auteurs de
l'Audiovisuel
American Intellectual Property Law Association
Confédération Internationale des Sociétés d'Auteurs
et Compositeurs
Intellectual Property Worldwide
The Society of Authors
The Writers' Guild of Great Britain
Verwertungsgesellschaft WORT (Germany)
SABAM
SACD
SIAE (Italy)
Writers Guild of Japan (Japan)
Digital watermarking:
Digital watermarking is the way to go for content
provider and picture archives like Corbis, HultonGetty, Tony Stone, PNI, PhotoDisc, and for the music
industry and for the movie industry.
There are different systems and solutions on the
market today to protect the data from an illegal
usage/piracy. It is NOT the aims of this paper to
promote or to recommend any product; my goal is
only to transmit to the audience the awareness about
how, when and what to do in order to protect the
owner rights.
amount distributed
recipients of payments
DOI
The Digital Object Identifier (DOI) is an
identification system for intellectual property in the
digital environment.
Developed by the International DOI Foundation on
behalf of the publishing industry, its goals are to
provide a framework for managing intellectual
content, link customers with publishers, facilitate
electronic commerce, and enable automated copyright
management. At DOI.ORG you can find information
about the underlying DOI technology, discover the
Currently, by using a watermarking software, it is
possible to embed into the file (audio, video or still
picture) some information, like the copyright unique
registration number and the file index number. The
problems that are not solved yet are basically two:
there is not available in the market a universal
watermark standard and each solution has some leaks,
such as image degradation quality after watermarking,
or weak to resist if the watermarked image is
manipulated, by using some filter and painting like
effects.
A strong watermarking solution should meet the
following requirements and third party attacks:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
Low Cost Digital Detection
Reliable Detection
Survivability
Licensable Under Reasonable Terms
To resist to any degree of image rotation
To resist to the attack of the StirMark
watermarking remove software
7.
To resist to the maximum level of jpeg
compression
8. To resist from very large image cropping/resize
to very large image enlargements
9. To provide to the image, after been watermarked
a certain level of image quality.
10. To resist from certain image
distortions/manipulations that the user can apply
with some Photoshop filters.....
11. To be detected/retrieved from a hard copy
detection
Copyright and Intellectual Property definition:
The law of copyright is essential to protect copyright
owners from unauthorised copying or other use of
their works.
It gives to copyright owners the exclusive right to
authorise exploitation of literary, dramatic, musical or
artistic works as well as sound recordings, films,
television and sound broadcasts, cable programmes
and published editions. Works attract copyright
protection when they appear in material form - they
do not have to be printed or published.
In general, patents protect inventions of tangible
things; copyrights protect various forms of written
and artistic expression; and trademarks protect a
name or symbol that identifies the source of goods or
services.
Definition of Patent:
A patent is a document, issued by the federal
government, that
grants to its owner a legally enforceable right to
exclude
others from practising the invention described and
claimed in
the document.
When photographers make agreements with editors,
end users, content providers such as stock agencies,
they have to rich an agreement with those third party
in order to define the rights and royalties; today, with
the spread of Internet, the needs to sign very clear
agreements has become even more important than
before.
The main problems rises when are not included in the
agreements all the usage and variables that can
happen once the image is placed on the web. In the
web, in fact it is often difficult to track end users, to
protect your rights or to prove any copyright
violation, because often today’s technology create for
this matter more confusion and problem, especially
because there is not out yet an international clear law
about rights. Therefore, it is often difficult to identify
end users, because they can surf the net, through an
anonymous nickname, or mirror sites can spread the
original copyright restriction to more countries that
were not included originally in the copyright
agreement between the artist/photographer and the
internet main content provider (on-line picture web
site library for example).
Guarantee:
It is sometimes difficult to judge an images quality
and depth from a low resolution file on a
computer screen. So, all images are money back
guaranteed, with the following conditions:
-The guarantee starts from shipment date and extends
for 60 days. The image must be returned
received back within 60 days of initial shipment
-The buyer is totally responsible for the shipping
costs of returning the print
-The guarantee is only valid if the print is returned in
exactly the same condition as it was when
it was sent. This is up to my discretion.
Image Quality:
One of the major problem of today photographic
archives is to provide top quality for demanding
commercial users and for fine quality editors, and
protect at the same time their rights on the web.
In addition to that, there are great expenses to
catalogue and digitise large photographic archive at
very good image quality. To understand this matter, I
can say for example that:
 it will take 3 minutes to preview and scan with a
medium quality, a 11x17 inches photographic
print, with no image resize and resolution at 300
dpi, that will create a file of about 10mb TIFFRGB, using a PowerLook II 36bit, gamma 3.2,
flat bed scanner
 it will take about 5 minutes do the same job with
a Kodak (CREO) EverSmart Pro, gamma 3.7
 it will take much longer if the work was done
from a slide acquired through a drum scanner
(longer because the preparation process for the
slide to be placed on the cylinder is very
tedious).
Image quality therefore is very important in today’s
quality business, where there is obviously a conflict
between the needs for high quality images for
publisher and quality end users and the fears about
digital piracy.
Examples of a digital watermarking process:
DIGIMARC WATERMARK ENCODER
DIGIMARC WATERMARK STRENGTH
WINDOW
SIGNUM VERIDATA ENCODER
SIGNUM VERIDATA ALTERATION NOTICE
DIGIMARC NOTICE THAT ANOTHER
WATERMARK IS EMBEDDED
SIGNUM VERIDATA: AREAS THAT HAVE
BEEN MODIFIED
Value chain for content delivery through a trusted
network
Cultural Heritage institutions should use several
cutting-edge protection technologies, which create
and apply digital watermarks both during the
digitization process and when the content is
downloaded. The technologies described in this
section is carried out by ALINARI and be applied for
high-resolution images.
An invisible watermarking unique code identifier,
embedded into each single digital item is linked to a
third party image tracking service (web crawler)
which constantly scans the web for images and data
containing that invisible code. Once an item is traced,
an email message is sent, along with the specific
image path and URL address to the registered
copyright owner which will verify whether or not that
particular online use is authorized.
A DRMS (Digital Rights Management System)
architecture typically consist of the following
components:

A content server consisting of four elements:
1. A content repository containing a
meta-data management environment
to uniquely identify the digital assets.
Some of the more efficient DRM
software applications can integrate
with asset management and content
management systems;
2. Product information, consisting of
rights and product meta-data;
3. A packager that encrypts the content
with the appropriate mechanisms to
unlock the content upon delivery to
an end user;
4. A delivery mechanism that will be
DRM format independent
The following diagram illustrates the use of
the solution:

License Server consisting of three
components:
1. An encryption key repository;
2. A user identity database which ties
back to the content;
3. A DRM license generator that binds
the content and the encryption key to
the end user’s device and registers the
user with the appropriate parties
involved in the digital distribution
value chain.
Final Remarks and Considerations:
DRMS is a legal and technical way to help content
providers, content creators and generally speaking
artists, photographers, composers and content
licensing institutions to licensee their valuable
content, using often a digital form delivery. Sony,
Microsoft, Philips and Apple are today some of the
most important success brands and company names
for success online e-content digital delivery such as
the mp3 Apple music sold through the I-Tunes web
site system.
Thanks to an harmonize DRMS system soon
everyone will be able to sell (and buy) great and
enriched content through a trusted, secure and legally
approved system worldwide.
Thanks to Digimarc and a secure watermarking
solution, for example, Alinari Photo Archive has been
able to sell, online, with high confidence, valuable
historical images around the globe, in an electronic
form since 1995 when Internet and e-commerce has
reached a secure, trusted and widely accepted selling
mechanism.
Links and interesting references:
American Intellectual Property Law Association:
http://www.aipla.org/
US Copyright Office: http://lcweb.loc.gov/copyright/
American I.P. Law Association:
http://www.aipla.org/overview.html
European Patent Office: http://www.european-patentoffice.org/
Intellectual Property Help Desk:
http://www.cordis.lu/ipr-helpdesk/
AIPPI: to promote and improve IP:
http://www.aippi.org/
EPIC-Electronic Privacy Internet Center:
http://www.aippi.org/
INTA-International Trademark Association:
http://www.inta.org/
IPR-Intellectual Property Worldwide:
http://www.ipworldwide.com/
Some Watermarking companies:
Signum http://www.signumtech.com
Digimarc, http://www.digimarc.com
DICE-Giovanni http://www.bluespike.com
Mediasec: http://www.mediasec.com
Copysight http://www.IP2.com
Signafy: http://www.signafy.com
Eikona:
http://www.alphatecltd.com/alphatec/sign.html
EXAMPLE OF A TYPICAL DRMS WORKFLOW