05/12/97 HOW TO TRIP UP CYBER RIP-OFF ARTISTS

HOW TO TRIP UP CYBER RIP-OFF ARTISTS

PROTECTING INTELLECTUAL-PROPERTY RIGHTS IS A BIG concern for media companies and other content creators hopping onto the Internet. Once a photo, a video clip, or other piece of artwork has been reduced to digital form and placed on the World Wide Web, Net surfers can easily make a copy--and then claim they created it themselves. Digimarc Corp. in Portland, Ore., wants to help artists keep track of their digital creations with special software and a tracking service.
It works like this: The new version of its PictureMarc software is included in popular image-editing programs such as Adobe's Photoshop. Artists must register with Digimarc for a personal I.D., which PictureMarc embeds as a series of changes in the ones and zeros that make up a picture file. For example, a digital photo of a new-model car might be changed so that every other pixel is slightly darker than the one next to it. Since the patterns are so deeply encoded into the digital files, the company says that such watermarking techniques act more like digital fingerprints, allowing owners to find their mark even if the file has been edited, or printed and re-scanned. What's more, to help creators find where their photos wind up on the Web, the company offers a service called MarcCentre. For $100 per year, its MarcSpider--a search engine developed with Datalytics Inc. in Dayton--will crawl the Web, looking for the sites that contain Digimarc-encoded files.
EDITED BY PAUL M. ENG