Digimarc Corp, the Portland, Oregon-based digital watermark software vendor is bolstering its product range to include content rights management applications with the acquisition of NetRights LLC. Digimark will pay an undisclosed sum for the Lebanon, New Hampshire-based developer of digital content identification technology. NetRights has been creating technologies to enable the enforcement of copyrights by developers, publishers and large-scale content owners, which Digimarc says is a natural extension its own watermarking product family. The acquisition should be completed by next month. Privately-held Digimarc raised $4.5m worth of funding last August from two Japanese firms, software developer Justsystem Corp and software and magazine publisher Softbank Corp’s venture capital firm Softbank Ventures – who now have unspecified stakes in the company – as well as AVI Ventures and Adobe Ventures LP. The round was managed by Hambrecht & Quist LLC. In a separate announcement, Digimarc has just delivered an upgrade of its PictureMarc digital watermarking software which when integrated with image editing software such as Adobe Photoshop 4.0, Micrografx Webtricity 1.0 and Graphics Suite 2.0, and CorelDRAW 7 and Corel Photo-paint 7, enables images to communicate copyright and authorship details whenever they are used. Enhancements in PictureMarc 1.5 include image serial numbers to identify and track images, making it possible to use less visible watermarks that survive longer in both digital and also in print applications.
