Digital watermarking company Digimarc Inc yesterday released its Batch Embedder tool that enables creators of images to quickly embed a digital copyright and other messages within an image. The company’s technology and services enables owners of copyrights to track the use of their images over the internet. Digimarc is targeting users that usually create multiple images as the Batch Embedder can process about an image a second on average, depending on the image size and processing power. It can also run unattended once the images have been selected. The tool embeds an ID – which could be a simple ‘circle in a C’ copyright notice or a host of other information about the owner/creator of the image – and compresses it into JPEG format. It also checks the quality of the image both before and after the embedding as the inclusion of copyright information involves a trade-off between image quality and robustness, says VP marketing Scott Carr. Later this month Digimarc will extend its technology beyond its own tools to anybody with a browser. Its forthcoming Mariner product will enable web users to go straight to a URL embedded within a image. For instance, the image could be of a product and the link could take the users straight to the website to buy the product, says Carr. Mariner will be available first for Internet Explorer, with a Netscape version coming in the coming months. Much has changed over the past few months at Portland, Oregon- based Digimarc. It found that its company name had better brand recognition that some of its tools and so it renamed them. The flagship PictureMarc watermarking software is now the Digimarc Plug-ins; BatchMarc Pro is the new Digimarc Batch Embedder; the basic Creator ID services for which Digimarc used to charge $99 a year to trace the use of the user’s ID around the net, is now free. The company makes its money from the other tools and a service whereby for $1000 a year it will search for the first one hundred uses of an image beyond the image owner’s website. Digimarc has a deal with Compaq Computer Corp’s AltaVista search site so that AltaVista feeds the data from its crawler to Digimarc so it can locate the images. Digimarc, in collaboration with Macrovision Corp has also begun its move into video and film copyright protection. It is part of a consortium called the Copyright Protection Technical Working Group that has put a proposal to the major Hollywood studios. The technology could be embedded into digital video and a digital video recorder could be prevented from copying a video from one machine to another using the technology. Digimarc and Macrovision are working on prototypes at the moment and Digimarc also has started a collaboration with Philips Electronics Co and expects to strike deals with other consumer electronic companies or PC companies soon, says Carr. Batch Embedder costs $80 and is available now at digimarc.com.
