Lara.Burhenn@digimarc.com | +1 503-469-4704
Beaverton, Ore. — September 15, 2014 — Digimarc Corporation (NASDAQ: DMRC) today introduced Digimarc® Guardian Watermarking for Publishing. The anti-piracy solution embeds unique, imperceptible and traceable digital watermarks into e-books, enabling distributors and publishers to track where their content is appearing online and identify the sources of leakage and unauthorized distribution. Digimarc also announced that HarperCollins Publishers, one of the largest publishers of consumer books in the world, and LibreDigital, an RR Donnelley company and a leading provider of distribution and fulfillment services for e-book retailers, have adopted Digimarc Guardian Watermarking for the HarperCollins US e-book catalog distributed globally.
“We are pleased to add this new service to our anti-piracy toolbox,” said Chantal Restivo-Alessi, Chief Digital Officer at HarperCollins Publishers. “Part of the value publishers provide is protecting the livelihoods of our authors and ensuring that they’re being properly compensated for their work. Digimarc Guardian Watermarks help us identify and stop potential e-book leaks in our digital supply chain that result in piracy. This technology, alongside the monitoring and takedown service, helps us better protect our authors’ content.”
Digimarc’s cloud-based platform offers easy-to-integrate API support for most e-book formats, including EPUB, PDF and MOBI. For each transaction, the platform generates a unique, traceable digital watermark and embeds it throughout the e-book. The imperceptible digital identifiers are extremely difficult for pirates to locate and remove. Adding Digimarc Guardian Watermarks takes just seconds and is invisible to the end customer.
Digimarc’s anti-piracy service then crawls the web 24x7 searching for watermarked content. When a watermark is detected, Digimarc provides the unique identifier to the publisher to match against its own transaction records. Digimarc Guardian Watermarks do not contain any personal or user information; the Digimarc Watermarks contain only anonymous digital IDs.
“We view Digimarc Guardian Watermarking as a compelling solution for our customers to help protect their intellectual property and assets,” said Tyler Ruse, General Manager at LibreDigital. “It’s cost-effective, can be implemented quickly and doesn’t interfere with the end-user reading experience. Most importantly, Digimarc has the reach to deliver this service on a global basis with very little impact on logistics.”
The Digimarc Guardian platform provides publishers with a powerful weapon to both understand and combat the broader piracy ecosystem while protecting revenues. It enables pirated or leaked files to be traced to sources of unauthorized distribution —either before or after general release. The platform helps publishers identify potentially unreliable distribution channels. While a Digimarc Guardian Watermark can enable a publisher to connect a pirated file to a specific distribution or transaction, the watermark itself contains no personally identifiable information.
As a further disincentive to piracy the platform also allows for the inclusion of visible social watermarks—such as the customer owner, date of purchase and file protection information—both for personalization and to discourage unauthorized redistribution.
“Digimarc has a long track record of developing innovative approaches to solving the problem of digital piracy,” said Eraj Siddiqui, President of Digimarc Guardian. “Digimarc Guardian Watermarking is a natural extension and complement to our web crawling and enforcement services, providing publishers and distributors with a full-circle solution for protecting revenues and the rights of content owners. We’re very pleased to be working with HarperCollins and LibreDigital as we launch this service.”
Authors, publishers and distributors interested in learning more about Digimarc Guardian should visit: www.digimarc.com/guardian.
Digimarc Corporation (NASDAQ:DMRC), based in Beaverton, Oregon, is a leading innovator and provider of consumer engagement, media management, and security solutions that create digital identities for all forms of media and many everyday objects. Digimarc’s digital IDs are imperceptible to humans and enable computers, networks and devices like mobile phones to better "see, hear and understand" brand impressions and other objects of interest. Digimarc has built an extensive intellectual property portfolio with patents in digital watermarking, content identification and management, media and object discovery to enable ubiquitous computing and related technologies. Digimarc develops solutions, licenses its intellectual property, and provides development services to business partners across a range of industries. For more information and the latest news, please visit www.digimarc.com and follow us on Twitter @DigimarcCorp.
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