There is a good paper on this issue on the Museums and the Web 2000 program;
I've taken the liberty of posting the abstract and URL below.
jennifer
Protecting a museum's digital stock through watermarks
Torsten Bissel, Manfred Bogen, Claus Riemann, GMD - German National
Research Center for Information Technology, Germany
Full text at: http://www.archimuse.com/mw2000/papers/bissel/bissel.html
Abstract: Basically, museums have only limited possibilities to
ensure their existence and to secure their funding: by sponsors, by
donations, by visitors, and by selling copies of their collection in
form of copyrights. While the first two (external) are almost
completely out of their control, they have major influence on the
visitors' acceptance by keeping their collection together, by
enlarging it, and by making it attractive (internal funding). This is
well understood since years. By granting copyrights to other parties
and by publishing parts of their collection in the Web, museums touch
the essence of their stock and they have to
enter a new technology realm at the same time. Granting copyrights
based on secure technology will become more and more crucial in the
near future as unallowed duplication will be facilitated which will
harm the museums' funding essentially.
This paper is not about intellectual property rights in general,
copyright policies, or about copyright laws. We will talk about
copyright technology based on watermarking. Ideally, all scans should
have an integrated header information and information including
author/ creator of the object, title, date, owner, copyright owner,
and some usage patterns (sale or license agreements). This
information has to be protected against manipulation and destruction.
Our paper starts with a description of the different approaches for
embedding a visible or non-visible digital watermark into multimedia
objects with focus on pictures. The feasibility of the different
approaches in respect to the needs of a common museum is evaluated.
After that a detailed description of various 'attacks' follows and
the 'robustness' of the various kinds of digital watermarks against
the forgery efforts are compared. An evaluation on currently
available systems on the market and on related research projects is
done next.
The ability to embed robust watermarks in digital images does not
necessarily imply the ability to establish ownership. Nevertheless it
is crucial for fingerprinting. Robust watermarks must be combined
with hash functions and time stamping mechanisms and be embedded in a
framework of trusted third parties for registration. In this third
part we analyse the different demands of a copyright protection
infrastructure, identify needed components and their
interrelationship, and describe a system that fits a museum's needs.
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