Fine-grain watermarking for intellectual property protection

Abstract The current online digital world, consisting of thousands of newspapers, blogs, social media, and cloud file sharing services, is providing easy and unlimited access to a large treasure of text contents. Making copies of these text contents is simple and virtually costless. As a result, pro...

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Main Authors: Stefano Giovanni Rizzo, Flavio Bertini, Danilo Montesi
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: SpringerOpen 2019-07-01
Series:EURASIP Journal on Information Security
Subjects:
Online Access:http://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s13635-019-0094-2
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author Stefano Giovanni Rizzo
Flavio Bertini
Danilo Montesi
author_facet Stefano Giovanni Rizzo
Flavio Bertini
Danilo Montesi
author_sort Stefano Giovanni Rizzo
collection DOAJ
description Abstract The current online digital world, consisting of thousands of newspapers, blogs, social media, and cloud file sharing services, is providing easy and unlimited access to a large treasure of text contents. Making copies of these text contents is simple and virtually costless. As a result, producers and owners of text content are interested in the protection of their intellectual property (IP) rights. Digital watermarking has become crucially important in the protection of digital contents. Out of all, text watermarking poses many challenges, since text is characterized by a low capacity to embed a watermark and allows only a restricted number of alternative syntactic and semantic permutations. This becomes even harder when authors want to protect not just a whole book or article, but each single sentence or paragraph, a problem well known to copyright law. In this paper, we present a fine-grain text watermarking method that protects even small portions of the digital content. The core method is based on homoglyph characters substitution for latin symbols and whitespaces. It allows to produce a watermarked version of the original text, preserving the anonymity of the users according to the right to privacy. In particular, the embedding and extraction algorithms allow to continuously protect the watermark through the whole document in a fine-grain fashion. It ensures visual indistinguishability and length preservation, meaning that it does not cause overhead to the original document, and it is robust to the copy and past of small excerpts of the text. We use a real dataset of 1.8 million New York articles to evaluate our method. We evaluate and compare the robustness against common attacks, and we propose a new measure for partial copy and paste robustness. The results show the effectiveness of our approach providing an average length of 101 characters needed to embed the watermark and allowing to protect paragraph-long excerpt or smaller the 94.5% of the times.
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spelling doaj.art-5a9ec5fb0ec24675b162793bc04f29e42022-12-21T19:19:44ZengSpringerOpenEURASIP Journal on Information Security2510-523X2019-07-012019112010.1186/s13635-019-0094-2Fine-grain watermarking for intellectual property protectionStefano Giovanni Rizzo0Flavio Bertini1Danilo Montesi2Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) HBKUDepartment of Computer Science and Engineering, University of BolognaDepartment of Computer Science and Engineering, University of BolognaAbstract The current online digital world, consisting of thousands of newspapers, blogs, social media, and cloud file sharing services, is providing easy and unlimited access to a large treasure of text contents. Making copies of these text contents is simple and virtually costless. As a result, producers and owners of text content are interested in the protection of their intellectual property (IP) rights. Digital watermarking has become crucially important in the protection of digital contents. Out of all, text watermarking poses many challenges, since text is characterized by a low capacity to embed a watermark and allows only a restricted number of alternative syntactic and semantic permutations. This becomes even harder when authors want to protect not just a whole book or article, but each single sentence or paragraph, a problem well known to copyright law. In this paper, we present a fine-grain text watermarking method that protects even small portions of the digital content. The core method is based on homoglyph characters substitution for latin symbols and whitespaces. It allows to produce a watermarked version of the original text, preserving the anonymity of the users according to the right to privacy. In particular, the embedding and extraction algorithms allow to continuously protect the watermark through the whole document in a fine-grain fashion. It ensures visual indistinguishability and length preservation, meaning that it does not cause overhead to the original document, and it is robust to the copy and past of small excerpts of the text. We use a real dataset of 1.8 million New York articles to evaluate our method. We evaluate and compare the robustness against common attacks, and we propose a new measure for partial copy and paste robustness. The results show the effectiveness of our approach providing an average length of 101 characters needed to embed the watermark and allowing to protect paragraph-long excerpt or smaller the 94.5% of the times.http://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s13635-019-0094-2Digital text watermarkingUnicode charactersCopyright protectionCopyright enforcementTampering detection
spellingShingle Stefano Giovanni Rizzo
Flavio Bertini
Danilo Montesi
Fine-grain watermarking for intellectual property protection
EURASIP Journal on Information Security
Digital text watermarking
Unicode characters
Copyright protection
Copyright enforcement
Tampering detection
title Fine-grain watermarking for intellectual property protection
title_full Fine-grain watermarking for intellectual property protection
title_fullStr Fine-grain watermarking for intellectual property protection
title_full_unstemmed Fine-grain watermarking for intellectual property protection
title_short Fine-grain watermarking for intellectual property protection
title_sort fine grain watermarking for intellectual property protection
topic Digital text watermarking
Unicode characters
Copyright protection
Copyright enforcement
Tampering detection
url http://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s13635-019-0094-2
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