Galaxy Group Narrows Copy-Protection Efforts

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February 19, 1999 (2:22 PM EST)

Galaxy Group Narrows Copy-Protection Efforts

By Yoshiko Hara ,

Five companies, calling themselves the Galaxy Group, have agreed to merge their digital-watermarking technologies to gain the upper hand in a competition to set the standard for safeguards against video piracy.

The move by Hitachi, IBM, NEC, Pioneer Electronic, and Sony cuts the number of competing protection schemes to two.

Since September 1997, when the Copy Protection Technical Working Group (CPTWG) began considering ways to check illegal copies of digital-video contents, 11 proposals by 11 companies have been squeezed down to three by groups composed of IBM/NEC, Hitachi/Pioneer/Sony, and Digimark/Macrovision/Philips. Now the first two groups have allied under the Galaxy banner, leaving only two coalitions to champion opposing digital watermarking standards.

An NEC spokesman said the IBM/NEC and Hitachi/Pioneer/Sony architectures had enough similarities "that the two groups could think about integration."

But the Galaxy group does not expect a similar merger to take place anytime soon between the Digimark/Macrovision/Philips group because its proposal is based on a different architecture.

The five companies will unify their digital-watermark technologies and plan a new proposal, perhaps as early as April, to CPTWG, a panel composed of experts from movie studios and the computer and consumer-electronics industries.

Using proposed NEC/IBM technology as a base, "consumer-electronics technology, especially video-related ones, will be added to the PC-based technology," said a spokesman for Sony.

"The integrated digital-watermark technology will have better coverage of both computer and consumer-electronics arena," said a spokesman at IBM Japan.

A Hitachi spokesman called video software the main target of the technology, but said "it will also be useful to protect contents of coming data broadcasting as well."

The IBM/NEC proposal features "remarking" and high durability of its watermark. Remarking, originally developed by NEC, is to remark copy-control information through copy generations. When a digital content allows onetime copy, the copy-control information will be changed to prohibit any further copy and will be remarked on the copied generation. Durability of the watermark, developed at IBM Japan's Tokyo Research Laboratory, means that it stands through repeated compression and decompression.

The five companies expect DVD to be the first application for the digital-watermarking technology. The Galaxy group expects its watermarking technology to supplement current DVD copy-protection measures. "If the technology is adopted at CPTWG, the DVD Forum will adopt it," a forum spokesman said.

Galaxy's watermarking technology will also be submitted to the Watermark Review Panel. WaRP is an evaluation body for Content Scrambling System (CSS) license holders, which will soon become an independent entity.