Menu
I'm a PhD student looking at software watermarking techniques and I always get asked 'who uses it?' The answer to which I don't know. There is a large amount of academic work on the subject (most notably from Collberg et al.) but very little indication of it's prevalence in industry. Software watermarking involves embedding a unique identifier into software in order to prove ownership, in a similar way to that of multimedia watermarking. So, maybe programmers here can answer the question: 'who uses software watermarking?'
954
Software watermarking is a defence technique used to prevent software piracy by embedding a signature, i.e., an identifier reliably representing the owner, in the code. When an illegal copy is made, the ownership can be claimed by extracting this identifier.
Watermarking is a technique with similarities to steganography. It has been around for centuries and is commonly used in money and stamps to assist in identifying counterfeiting. The idea behind watermarking is to create a translucent image on the paper to provide authenticity.
The main use of watermarking related to authentication includes trusted cameras, video surveillance and remote sensing software, digital insurance claim evidence, journalistic photography, and digital rights administration systems.
A digital watermark is data embedded into digital intellectual property (IP) to identify its originator or owner. A digital watermark tracks online digital media use and warns against potentially unauthorized access and/or use. Digital watermarks complement digital rights management (DRM) technology.
Thats a very interesting question. I would have up-voted you if I got the permission;-).
I actually wonderred the same question 4 years ago when I was doing my masters on dynamic software watermarks. I heard from some sources that IBM once won a law suit on copyright cases against some company, where software watermark actually got used as a hard evidence. But saidly its merely a heresay as I cannot find any source for that story.
Another case is that a chinese company successfully proved that google china stole their dict data and used in google's chinese PinYin input system. See this
I dont really have an answer to your question. But I believe software watermarks will be recogised as a powerful tool not only in the acdemic world. The reason is with the burst of app store iphone/ipad/android applications, there is real money,lots of money involved in the piracy--anti-piracy battle.
There have been so many cases that people simply download paid apps and reverse engineer them,make minor modifications and then claim copyright and release the apps to make money.
So I will bet a company will be there that speciallises in utilising software watermarks to prove owership, might combind with using obfuscation to make reverser engineering harder.
The market is huge, the problem is getting bigger and the solution has been established (at least in acdemic world) ;-)
It might be time for me to re-read my paper and see what I can do to make some money ;-).
188
The following case is often used as a typical example (Excerpt from the book "Surreptious Software", from Christian Collberg & Jasvir Nagra) :
IBM sued a rival for theft of their PC-AT ROM. They argued that the defendant’s programmers pushed and popped registers in the same order as in the original code, which was essentially a birthmark. They also argued that it would be highly unlikely for two programs to both say push R1; push R2; add when push R2; push R1; add is semantically equivalent
Counsel for IBM Corporation. Software birthmarks. Talk to BCS Technology of Software Protection Special Interest Group. (1985)
25
If you love us? You can donate to us via Paypal or buy me a coffee so we can maintain and grow! Thank you!
Donate Us With
