Microsoft has entered the war for intellectual property within the digital watermarking space, at present with a filing for a forensic audio watermarking system in the US. Such a filing is usually the beginning of a long legal battle for ownership of the technology and audio watermarking is a well established business.
All watermarking to some extent relies on the Digimarc patents but usually go a lot further and most companies begin by licensing that technology. It was originally put together to stop real documents from being forged such as driver licenses, or national ID cards. It has also been used to secure of financial documents, and Digimarc has over 300 US patents in the area
At IBC we talked at length with Philips which acknowledged this but then insisted that it provided the bulk of intellectual property in both audio and video watermarking, but had sold its IPR for audio to Gracenote, and continued to develop it for video on set tops and other formats. Philips provides underlying technology for companies like Thomson, which has a range of video watermarking products for things like Digital Cinema distribution and Oscar Screener videos, which use some of its own intellectual property and some bought in, like from Philips.
At the same time DRM specialists Widevine and Verimatrix have a war going on over the inclusion of forensic watermarking, the process of writing the identity of the player which last played out a piece of video, in hidden fragments throughout a file. Microsoft is effectively saying that it can do this with audio now.
While we are not going to say that the Microsoft patents are similar in any way to these bodies of work, because they mostly target video, they each have work in audio as well, and this filing makes Microsoft a very late entry to a couple of businesses in the process of taking off.
At IBC Watermarking was suddenly at the height of fashion for video this year, while audio watermarking is well established.
In almost every case where a technology, such as DRM, suddenly finds Microsoft is a convert, it ends up in an intellectual property dispute, and usually has to pay out some huge royalty fee to a third party who’s inventions the Microsoft products also rely on, such as to Intertrust over DRM and it has an ongoing dispute over codec technology embedded in VC-1. Microsoft almost invariably ensures the market by bundling its new products for free, which use intellectual property already filed by someone else, hence the fight.
The technology is called “stealthy audio watermarking,” and relies on a slightly random approach to placing watermarks into audio signals to make them harder to detect and remove. The patent cites 54 other US patents and a handful of overseas patents, dating back to the 1990s and was filed in May 2004 by researchers at Microsoft Research and just awarded.
We’ll keep our eyes peeled for the arrival of this patent, and any video equivalents, in Microsoft products over the coming months.