A Special Section of Intelligent Automation and Soft computing - Soft Computing For Copyright Protection

In today's digital age, the creation, transmission and manipulation of digital media content, such as images, audios and videos, are made simply through digital processing tools that are easily and widely available. As a consequence, piracy that copies, tampers and retransmits the media content is becoming increasingly easier and more popular now. This eventually concurs a great deal of loss to content producers or service providers. Thus, developing the copyright protection technologies that are able to detect, prevent and authenticate the media content's copyrights becomes extremely urgent. In the past decade, some means have been proposed and used for copyright protection, such as digital watermarking for ownership protection, multimedia authentication for tampering detection, digital fingerprinting for traitor tracing, perceptual hash for copy tracking and piracy search, etc. The aim of this special issue is to present a collection of high-quality research papers that report the latest research advances in the area of soft computing based copyright protection techniques. In this special issue, we selected 7 papers, which can demonstrate advanced works in this field. All the papers submitted to the special issue were reviewed by at least three anonymous referees each and had two rounds of improvement. A detailed overview of the selected works is given below. The first two papers are related with Digital Rights Management (DRM). Among them, the first one, entitled " Game-Theoretic Analyses and Simulations of Adoptions of Security Policies for DRM in Contents Sharing Scenario " Yang), analyzes the relationship between two DRM stakeholders, i.e., providers and sharers. The game theory is introduced to model the mutual influence of adoptions of trusted computing enabled security policies on benefits of the two stakeholders. Although it is still an open issue, the paper's work will bring some innovative information to DRM system designers or operators. The