Digital watermarking summary and thanks

[Mark McFarland]

Group:  

Thanks to the folks who replied to my previous message with information
and with urls.  I had to summarize this work anyway so thought I would
post
it for anyone who was interested.

Here is what I was trying to find a product to do: 

 to attach a copyright statement that would be visible on the printed
copy but
  invisible on the monitor - and that would appear in some
  obtrusive way on the analog version.
 
 Here are a few possible approaches:
 
 1-Do it yerselfer  -  Write a program that will append a postscript
file
 to a graphic image so that when the image file is sent the printer will
 interpret the postscript instructions and print the  copyright
statement
 along with the image. It would still be very difficult (impossible?) to
use postscript
 to print diagnally across the jpg.  THis is not a desirable solution
 unless we have lots 'o time on our hands.
 
 2-IBM Watermarking technology.  This is stuff that I cannot locate
price
 information on - I've been to their web site, I've called them - but
 can't seem to find much about cost of even how it works.  I'm not
 sure if it is a hardware solution or a software solution or some
combination.
 I am still looking at this but don't think it will be a solution for
 us...probably to pricey.  But I'll keep looking.
 (http://www.research.ibm.com/image_apps/index.html)
 
 3-Watermarking software (Digimarc or FBI).  THis sofware comes with
 the latest versions of Photoshop (4.0) and will assign copyright
 statements or other markings to the image in a way that will render the
 markings permanent.  It will not make them more visible during
 printing...the watermarks, in fact, will be feint to transparent and
 will appear on the monitor as they appear in print.  So, if we happened
 to see on of our images in print or on a website somewhere we could
take
 that image and examine it with special software and view the watermark
-
 if it was our watermark we could then prove that the user was in
 violation of copyright.
 (http://www.digimarc.com/)
 (http://www.highwaterfbi.com/)
 (http://www.digital-watermark.com)
 (also something called MusiCode - from IBM but can't locate a url)
 (also:
http://www-nt.e-technik.uni-erlangen.de/~hartung/watermarkinglinks.html
  - which is a site for general information on watermarking multimedia)
 
 Recommendations:  I will request an upgrade to photoshop 4.0 (which
will
 bring us the digimark plug-ins) and that will give us something to work
 with.  I don't really think we can do much better than this (unless we
 spend time creating a custom solution).
 
 Also, as Drew says, LC is not too concerned about printing 72dpi images
-
 they look pretty bad.

 Mark McFarland -- UT Austin General Libraries --  512-495-4358