Managing intellectual property rights: from products to services

Copyright protection is becoming an important issue for organisations that create, use and distribute digital content. One of the most promising methods for copyright protection is digital watermarking, an efficient and robust data hiding technique. In this paper we present the information and system architecture of an intellectual property rights (IPR) protection and management service based on watermarking. We argue that, in an networked world, IPR should migrate from tools to services in order to achieve more scalable and efficient solutions. The possibilities that new standards, and in particular JPEG2000, are offering is also discussed.