Digital Watermarking Alliance Publishes White Paper Addressing Copyright and Content Identification Issues within P2P and Social Networks

Digitally watermarked songs, movies, TV or radio programming and images can be identified on P2P systems and online communities, even after content has been re-purposed

Los Angeles, Calif., Oct. 23, 2006 — The Digital Watermarking Alliance (DWA), an international group of industry leading companies, today announced a new white paper that discusses how digital watermarking can effectively address the copyright and content identification issues facing the peer-to-peer (P2P) and social networking communities.

Published by the DWA, the white paper outlines how content owners can embed digital watermarks as content identifiers and digital media serial numbers into entertainment content to communicate the identity of copyrighted works. Because digital watermarks inherently survive the “ripping” process and format conversions, copyrighted songs, movies, TV or radio programming and images can be identified on P2P systems and online communities such as MySpace, YouTube, Google and Yahoo.

With technology that has been proven to be effective in billions of media objects, including music, TV, movies and digital images, P2P and online content sharing providers have the opportunity to work with content owners to deploy systems to detect digitally watermarked content as it is introduced into those systems and help ensure proper usage or compensation in accordance with rights.

The Digital Watermarking Alliance white paper is available at www.digitalwatermarkingalliance.org

Representatives of the DWA will also be speaking about digital watermarking as a solution to content identification issues at three upcoming industry conferences:

• DCIA P2P Media Summit LA, Oct. 23-26, 2006, DoubleTree Suites, Santa Monica, California

  (http://www.dcia.info/P2PMSLA/)

• Digital Hollywood Fall, Oct. 24-26, 2006, Loews Hotel, Santa Monica, California

  (http://www.digitalhollywood.com/)

• Digital Hollywood Europe, Nov. 29-Dec. 1, London

  (http://www.digitalhollywood.com/)

The Digital Watermarking Alliance was launched in September 2006 to promote the value of digital watermarking to content owners, industry, policy makers and consumers (www.digitalwatermarkingalliance.org).

Digital watermarks can identify copyrighted content and associated rights, during and after distribution, to determine copyright ownership and facilitate rights management policies while enabling innovative new content distribution and usage models. Digital watermarks are broadly deployed with billions of watermarked objects and hundreds of millions of watermark detectors in the market, supporting various applications. (http://www.digitalwatermarkingalliance.org/casestudies.asp)

For more information about the Digital Watermarking Alliance, please visit: www.digitalwatermarkingalliance.org

CONTACT: For media inquiries, please contact Jeremy Bartram (Bartram@itstrategies.com or 1 206 264 1999).

About the Digital Watermarking Alliance
The Digital Watermarking Alliance (DWA) is an international alliance of industry leading companies that deliver valuable digital watermarking technology and solutions to a broad range of customers and markets around the world. Member companies include Cinea, Inc., a Dolby company (NYSE:DLB), Digimarc (Nasdaq: DMRC), GCS Research, Jura, MediaGrid, Media Science International, Philips Electronics, Signum, Teletrax, Thomson (Euronext 18453; NYSE: TMS), Verance, and Verimatrix. For more information, please visit www.digitalwatermarkingalliance.org