Scope

Although copyright issues have been discussed in various international forums over the years, the opposing parties are far from reaching agreement. This is of great concern to Japan as harsh worldwide cost competition has particularly hurt its manufacturing industries, which has made its content (anime, J-pop, etc.) industries relatively more important. Copyright protection is essential to content industries, and these industries will become even more important in Japan. While copyright law reform in 2012 strengthened the protection of movies and video, it did nothing to improve the protection of still images.

Although cryptographic systems provide basic content protection, content security systems such as DVD and Blu-ray Disc (BD) copy protection systems and the BS Conditional Access Systems Co., Ltd. (B-CAS) are not perfect in how they perform in practice. From the standpoint of researchers and engineers, we need to research and develop practical technologies that better protect content. Although watermarking is one possibility, various problems first need to be solved, and the application of watermarks is very limited. The IHC Committee is working to change the current situation and to promote research on the application of watermarks. Our goal is the development of schemes that enable watermarks to be used in content providing systems to protect copyrights.

Although many researchers have been studying watermarking techniques, and many robust schemes have been proposed, there is still a need for explicit criteria that can be used for evaluating watermarking schemes. Even though some schemes are quite robust against existing attacks, it is difficult to fairly compare their levels of robustness. To change this situation, the IHC Committee is working to establish standard evaluation criteria by holding annual watermark competitions. These competitions will enhance the criteria and hopefully lead to a certain level of consensus on the practicality of using watermarking. Our activities should stimulate researchers to develop better and better watermarking schemes and activate the copyright protection movement in both academia and industry.