Fine-grain watermarking for intellectual property protection

Abstract

The current online digital world, consisting of thousands of newspapers, blogs, social media, and cloud file sharing services, is providing easy and unlimited access to a large treasure of text contents. Making copies of these text contents is simple and virtually costless. As a result, producers and owners of text content are interested in the protection of their intellectual property (IP) rights. Digital watermarking has become crucially important in the protection of digital contents. Out of all, text watermarking poses many challenges, since text is characterized by a low capacity to embed a watermark and allows only a restricted number of alternative syntactic and semantic permutations. This becomes even harder when authors want to protect not just a whole book or article, but each single sentence or paragraph, a problem well known to copyright law. In this paper, we present a fine-grain text watermarking method that protects even small portions of the digital content. The core method is based on homoglyph characters substitution for latin symbols and whitespaces. It allows to produce a watermarked version of the original text, preserving the anonymity of the users according to the right to privacy. In particular, the embedding and extraction algorithms allow to continuously protect the watermark through the whole document in a fine-grain fashion. It ensures visual indistinguishability and length preservation, meaning that it does not cause overhead to the original document, and it is robust to the copy and past of small excerpts of the text. We use a real dataset of 1.8 million New York articles to evaluate our method. We evaluate and compare the robustness against common attacks, and we propose a new measure for partial copy and paste robustness. The results show the effectiveness of our approach providing an average length of 101 characters needed to embed the watermark and allowing to protect paragraph-long excerpt or smaller the 94.5% of the times.

An Authorship Protection Technology for Electronic Documents Based on Image Watermarking

“…The paper [16] describes a method for protecting text in Arabic, which includes modifying the lengths of spaces and using a special character of the language. At the first stage of the algorithm presented in [17], a watermark is generated based on the user's password and the original text using a hash function, and at the second stage, the created watermark is embedded into the text using homoglyph characters. In [18], it is proposed to change the line spacing when embedding a watermark to ensure resistance to printing and scanning attacks.…”

New Color Image Zero-Watermarking Using Orthogonal Multi-Channel Fractional-Order Legendre-Fourier Moments

“…Watermarking technology of digital images has been extensively studied and used as an emerged powerful copyright protection technologies and authentication of the content of digital images and software protection [1][2][3][4]. In general, the methods of digital watermarking can be classified into different ways [1,5]: visible, invisible, blind, semi-blind, non-blind, Fragile, semi-fragile, and robust watermarking In recent years, the well-known techniques for resolving the protection copyright of images are traditional technology for embedded watermarking [6,7]. The main idea of Traditional watermarking algorithms is to incorporate the watermark information to the base (original) image; once embedding the information of the watermark, the data extracted to enforce copyright protection [8][9][10][11][12].…”

Arabic Feature-Based Text Watermarking Technique for Sensitive Detecting Tampering Attack

“…A technique of digital-Watermarking (DWM) can be inserted into digital material through various details such as text, binary pictures, audio, and video [2,3]. A fine-grained text watermarking procedure is proposed based on replacing the white spaces and Latin symbols with homoglyph characters [4].…”