Watermarking of Electronic Text Documents

  • Authors:
  • Mohan S. Kankanhalli;K. F. Hau

  • Affiliations:
  • School of Computing, National University of Singapore, Singapore 119260 mohan@comp.nus.edu.sg;School of Computing, National University of Singapore, Singapore 119260

  • Venue:
  • Electronic Commerce Research
  • Year:
  • 2002

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Abstract

With the tremendous development of the Internet, it has become desirable to distribute text documents electronically. However, commercial publishers may be reluctant to offer valuable digital documents online for the fear that they will be re-transmitted or copied illegally. To address this problem, we propose a robust watermarking technique, whereby electronic text documents are fingerprinted with one or more semantics-preserving modifications to the document text. The text modifications may be selected so that multiple copies of the same master document will all have the same meaning. By examining text modifications in an unauthorized copy, one can identify the authorized source and the recepient. In this paper, we present a new method that is accurate, robust against attacks (e.g., the cyber pirate may post only a section or a paragraph of a registered text online), scalable (e.g., a few pages of text to hundreds of pages) and secure (e.g., remove or modify embedded watermark with or without knowledge of watermarking method). This approach could therefore facilitate e-commerce of newspapers, journals, magazines, and in general any electronic text document possessing commercial value.