Digital Watermarking Alliance White Paper Addresses P2P, "Orphan Works"

Authored by Mark Hefflinger on February 5, 2007 - 2:09pm.

Washington - The Digital Watermarking Alliance (DWA), a trade group of companies supporting the digital rights management technology, on Monday announced the publication of a white paper that discusses how digital watermarking can address the issue of "orphan works," or those whose copyright owners cannot be identified or located.

Presented to the House Entertainment Industries Caucus on Monday in Washington, the white paper was a collaboration of the DWA, Distributed Computing Industry Association, Motion Picture Association of America, and firms including Intent MediaWorks.

The white paper "describes how embedding, detecting and responding to watermarks can work to identify digitally distributed content in order to enable effective monitoring, media serialization and management of copyrighted content," said DWA chairman Reed Stager.

The document also aims to show how "digital watermarking can be used to provide consumers with a wider range of legitimate ways to get movies using P2P networks," said MPAA chairman and CEO Dan Glickman.