Digital Fingerprints

Creative artists finally manage to leave a permanent mark.

A digital watermark? Or a fingerprint? Call it anything, says Geoffrey Rhoads, founder of Digimarc Corporation which has made digital fingerprinting a reality. It consists of an encoded bit of information about the creator of an image and its copyright. Anyone who has ever surfed the Net knows how easy it is to copy an image made by someone around the world, and he wouldnt even know. Forget copyrights and royalties.

Or copying from a digital gallery. Art lovers can either buy a compact disc with images or visit the gallery on-line. They might even download some of them into their digital art collection. But at the same time, the digital images carry no mark or proof of the creators identity.

The headache of communicating copyright in a digital setting has been severe. Images posted on computer networks are easily copied. And unlike the analogue copying process, where repeated reproductions tend to degrade the image quality, a piece of digital information can be copied and copied forever. Each copy has exactly the same quality as the first.

For, as they say, there is no such thing as a copy, only another original when digitized. Each new version is an exact clone of the previous one.

It was here that the need for a technique that would carry an authors imprint forever was acutely felt. PictureMarc embeds an imperceptible digital watermark within an image, which stays with it forever. With no discernible change in its appearance. And by linking the watermark to a database with information on both the image and its creator, tracking down details of a piece of work is that much simpler.

Digimarc offers a subscriber locator service where subscribers are assigned a unique creator serial number and asked to provide contact information about themselves and their work. These details