1.) What is the Digital Watermarking Alliance (DWA)?
The Digital Watermarking Alliance (DWA) is a group of organizations that share a common interest in furthering the adoption of digital watermarking and which are actively involved in commercialization of digital watermarking-based technology, applications, systems and services. Members service a broad range of industries around the world.

2.) What is the DWA’s mission?
The mission of the DWA is to create awareness and promote the value of digital watermarking to content owners, industry, policy makers, and consumers.

3.) Who is involved with the DWA?
The Digital Watermarking Alliance is made up of 6 organizations that are successfully delivering digital watermarking technology and solutions to various markets, including media and entertainment, state and national governments, mobile communications and other commercial markets. Members include: Content Armor, Irdeto, MarkAny, Media Science International, NexGard and Verimatrix.

4.) What is digital watermarking?
Digital watermarking is the process by which identifying data is woven into media content such as images, printed materials, movies, music or TV programming, giving those objects a unique, digital identity that can be used for a variety of valuable applications. Imperceptible to the human senses yet easily recognized by special software detectors, a digital watermark remains constant even through recording, manipulation and editing, compression and decompression, encryption, decryption and broadcast – without affecting the quality of the content.

Digital watermarking can enable content identification, forensic tracking and copyright communication on a broad scale and can provide a range of solutions for identifying, securing, managing and tracking digital images, audio, video, and printed materials. In fact, digital watermarking technology has already been adopted by many photographers, movie studios, record labels, television broadcasters, and corporate enterprises. These industries use digital watermarking to identify, protect and manage the rights to their content as they embrace innovative distribution or business models and provide consumers with new entertainment experiences, enhanced convenience, and greater portability of their media content.

Digital watermarks can identify copyrighted content and associated rights, during and after distribution, to determine copyright ownership and enable rights management policy while enabling innovative new content distribution and usage models.

5.) Where is digital watermarking used today?
Digital watermarks are broadly deployed in the market, supporting various applications. The technology helps Movie and TV studios and music labels deter piracy of movies, music and TV and DVDs used in the Academy Award Screener program. It is also used to secure the distribution of digital cinema content as well as early release and 4K/UHD content in broadcast and pay TV distribution.