Combating digital video piracy: safeguarding intellectual property rights

Abstract

This research introduces an advanced watermarking methodology designed to combat digital video piracy, specifically targeting traitor tracing and identifying piraters within digital media distribution platforms. The study is primarily motivated by the inadequacies of the current Cinematography Amendment Bill, which fails to address digital video piracy. This legislative oversight leads to significant economic impacts and threatens the intellectual property rights of creators across diverse media genres. Digital piracy’s expansive reach, especially in large-scale content distribution networks, necessitates the development of robust and scalable anti-piracy solutions that seamless integrate into Content Delivery Network (CDN) architectures, essential for effective distribution. In analyzing the current digital content protection landscape, we have identified critical gaps in existing watermarking schemes. Many of these schemes lack the robustness to counter common piracy tactics such as screen capturing, widely used by digital pirates. Additionally, the computational demands of some existing watermarking techniques make them unsuitable for CDN architectures. Our research proposes a novel watermarking approach, focusing on creating a resilient system against sophisticated piracy methods that is computationally efficient for real-time application in CDN environments. This research aspires to set a new standard in digital rights management, particularly in protecting the intellectual property of educational content creators, thereby contributing significantly to the broader field of digital content security.