Watermarking and transferring material

• US 20020080964A1
• Filed: 12/06/2001
• Published: 06/27/2002
• Est. Priority Date: 12/07/2000
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Sony United Kingdom Limited (Sony Group Corp.)
• Original Assignee: Sony United Kingdom Limited (Sony Group Corp.)
• Inventors: Stone, Jonathan James, Foster, Richard, Pelly, Jason Charles, Gugenheim, Paul, Delacour, Isabel
• Granted Patent: US 7,443,982 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 380/255
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 21/10 Protecting distributed programs or content, e.g. vending or licensing of copyrighted material protection in video systems or pay television H04N7/16 ; Digital rights management [DRM]
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 21/16 Program or content traceability, e.g. by watermarking
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 21/234 Processing of video elementary streams, e.g. splicing of video streams or manipulating encoded video stream scene graphs
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 21/44 Processing of video elementary streams, e.g. splicing a video clip retrieved from local storage with an incoming video stream or rendering scenes according to encoded video stream scene graphs
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 21/8352 involving content or source identification data, e.g. Unique Material Identifier [UMID]
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 21/8358 involving watermark protecting executable software by watermarking G06F21/16; image watermarking in general G06T1/0021; watermarks inserted in still images for transmission purposes H04N1/32144; inserting watermarks during video coding H04N19/467
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 7/1675 Providing digital key or authorisation information for generation or regeneration of the scrambling sequence pseudo-random number generators in general G06F7/58

Abstract

A system for watermarking and transferring watermarked material comprises a transaction server, first and second clients, first apparatus for applying a perceptible watermark to the material and second apparatus for removing the watermark. The server, clients and first and second apparatus are linked by one or more communications networks. The system is arranged to implement the steps of:

transferring from the transaction server to the first apparatus (i) data for creating a watermark, the creating data including (a) data defining an invertible algorithm and (b) data for creating at least one security key associated with the algorithm and (ii) data for creating a material identifier;

using the said first apparatus to apply a material identifier to the material and applying a watermark to the material, using the said creating data;

transferring from the first client to the transaction server the said material identifier and data for inverting the algorithm including the said at least one key;

transferring the watermarked material to the second apparatus;

deriving the said material identifier from the material;

transferring the identifier from the second client to the transaction server;

subject to predetermined conditions being satisfied, transferring from the transaction server to the second apparatus watermark removal data associated with the said material identifier, the removal data including at least one key and data defining an algorithm for removing the watermark in conjunction with the key; and

using the second apparatus to remove the watermark using the said removal data.

Claims