MIRADOR: MPEG 4 Intellectual Property Rights by Adducing and Ordering

Project Description Project Objectives The MIRADOR project objective is to define, develop and promote a framework for copyright protection, consistent with the MPEG-4 ad’hoc group specifications, including still pictures, video and audio protection. In a digital world, where perfect copying is easy, owners of information resources are fearful of releasing proprietary information to an environment, which appears to be lacking in security. This reluctance is easily explained by the combination of different characteristics of digital media changing the face of intellectual property law, as we know it: • Ease of replication: the ease with which works in a digital form can be replicated poses many challenges for the law, especially the copyright law. The technology of reproduction has improved dramatically in the 20th century. As this technology has improved, it has become more difficult for copyright owners to exercise control over replication of their works and to obtain compensation for unauthorised replication. • Ease of transmission and multiple use: a second characteristic of digital media that poses challenges for traditional intellectual property regimes is the ease with which works in a digital form can be transmitted and used by multiple users. • Plasticity of digital media: one of the most relevant peculiarities of digital works is their plasticity. In other words they do not have the permanence which characterises other kinds of works such as printed works. The consequence is that copyright owners now have more reasons to be concerned about what an individual user might do with his or her copy of the work. Until now, due to the absence of effective mechanisms for identifying the intellectual property contents of digital objects and for tracking and monitoring their use, creators and rights holders have lacked the assurance they need for distributing their material to the increasing audience of consumers who enjoy the freedom of electronic distribution. Since a number of years, active R&D efforts have been concentrated on this topic and led to the emergence of technical solutions, enabling to provide tools for solving this complex problem. Those solutions particularly encompass watermarking techniques, which are the ability to embed information in an indelible way in digital productions. The ACTS Projects TALISMAN and OCTALIS were pioneers and successfully developed watermarking techniques for protecting video for MPEG-2. The MIRADOR project was initiated to evaluate and upgrade existing watermarking techniques developed within the MPEG-2 framework, to the new issues arising within the MPEG-4 standard. MIRADOR aims at: • integrating MPEG-2 watermarking technologies into MPEG-4 for both video and