NoMark: A Novel Method for Copyright Protection of Digital Videos without Embedding Data

Copyright protection of digital media content is becoming increasingly important with increasing potential for content monetization which is attributable to digital convergence. High volumes of uploaded content in social networking and media sharing sites makes it increasingly difficult to monitor all the uploaded content for copyright infringement, piracy and illegal distribution. Currently, digital watermarking is predominantly used for copyright protection of images and videos. Watermarking involves embedding data into an image or a video in an invisible or visible manner. This traditional method is prone to many known watermark attacks aimed at detecting and distorting or destroying the embedded data. In this paper, we present the No Mark Method, a robust, reliable, and efficient scheme for copyright protection of digital video content without embedding any data in to it. The method is based on visual cryptography and can be used to watermark individual scenes in a video and hence protects not only the copyright of complete video but also of each individual scene in the video. The method is robust against video fragmentation attack, unauthorized insertion of scenes from a protected video into another video and various other video watermarking attacks. There is no involvement of any notary agency to establish copyright ownership of a digital video.