Tracing Pirated Content on the Internet: Unwinding Ariadne's Thread

Digital rights management (DRM) technologies have recently received many blows that might hamper their future. Copyright holders, by imposing tight restrictions on their assets' usability, have managed to infuriate consumers to the point at which the music industry has partly dropped DRM. Is multimedia content protection dead? Well, not quite yet. Discreet protection technologies, such as content fingerprinting and traitor tracing, are receiving increasing interest. Strictly speaking, these technologies don't prevent piracy. Instead, they permit enforcement of a damage control policy should piracy occur. Here, we focus on these technologies, particularly traitor tracing, which perhaps offers the most promising way to navigate the complex maze of Internet content piracy.