Digital Watermarking Alliance also announces its participation on the 'Piracy and DRM' panel at Digital Hollywood Spring LOS ANGELES, June 11 /PRNewswire/ -- The Digital Watermarking Alliance (DWA), an international group of industry leading companies involved in commercializing digital watermarking solutions, today announced the alliance is seeing continued industry demand for real-world solutions to deter the piracy of entertainment content, better manage and measure broadcast programming, enhance the security of driver licenses, and improve the use of commercial and geospatial imagery. The DWA also announced that it will be represented at the Digital Hollywood Spring conference June 11-14 in Santa Monica by Joe Winograd, who is speaking Wed., June 13 at 10:45 a.m. on behalf of the Alliance on the panel: Piracy and Digital Rights Management: Legal, Legislative and Social Issues Surrounding DRM and Anti-Piracy Implementation. The DWA was also recently represented by Eric Diehl at Broadband World Forum June 5-8 in Beijing, China, with participation on two digital rights management-related panels. Recent industry developments and news demonstrating growing momentum and interest in digital watermarking solutions include: -- Cinea, a Dolby company, announced early this year that its digital watermarking-based anti-piracy solutions were incorporated into 23 award screener films as part of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) 2006-2007 awards season. Visit: http://www.cinea.com/press/BAFTAscreener_0107.pdf. Cinea also launched the next generation of its Running Marks(TM) system for video on demand systems and is also offering digital watermarking support for compressed domain message insertion, allowing system operators to add powerful and easy-to-use serialization capabilities to their content distribution methods. Visit: http://www.cinea.com/press/NAB2007Release.pdf and http://www.cinea.com/press/MultiCodecNAB2007.pdf -- DataMark Technologies, a Singapore-based company, announced that the newest version of its digital watermarking solution, StegMark, will be distributed together with Hewlett Packard's high-end scanners and also in Singapore's new traffic enforcement camera systems. StegMark utilizes patented and standard cryptographic algorithms to secure digital photographs against modification. StegMark is targeted at law enforcement agencies and companies required to ensure the authenticity and copyright of their digital photographs. Visit: http://www.datamark.com.sg/ -- Digimarc announced a licensing agreement with Card Scanning Solutions. CSS, a provider of ID scanning and verification solutions, will incorporate Digimarc digital watermarking inspection capabilities into its portfolio of ID reading and verification solutions to help customers such as retailers, insurers and auto dealerships fight identity theft and fraud by reliably authenticating driver licenses presented as proof of identity and age. Visit: http://www.digimarc.com/media/release.asp?newsID=535 -- GCS Research announced a strategic partnership with Valtus to introduce next-generation geospatial digital watermarking functionality into Valtus imagery solutions. The companies have built a demonstration of the capabilities offered by digital watermarking using a homeland security scenario wherein a "dirty bomb" was detonated in downtown San Diego, requiring rapid geospatial situational awareness for evacuation of the affected population and massively scaled response by local, state, and federal resources into the downtown area. Visit: http://www.gcs-research.com/index.php/ID/ 0f3066688b25c0f828b60a4cae5c4661/fuseaction/announcements.detail.htm (due to the length of the url you may have to copy and paste this link into your browser) -- Philips introduced VTrack, a robust watermarking solution for enhanced content protection in Pay TV applications that can survive camcorder copying. VTrack can easily be integrated with the set-top-box chipsets from major vendors including Broadcom, ST and Texas Instruments. Moreover, Philips announced an Avid AVX(TM) (Avid Video eXtensions) plug-in that allows content creators to use Philips watermarking technology within their Avid editing workflow to protect their content with a unique watermark. Visit: http://www.philips.com/ci -- Signum announced that it continues to expand its base of VeriData and VeriData iDem users, enabling government agencies to secure digital images against fraudulent or accidental alteration. Users include over 30 police agencies in the U.K., 10 agencies in the U.S. and large-scale installations in Australia and South Africa. Visit: http://www.signumtech.com/ -- Teletrax announced that their contract with ABC Television Network has been extended to include coverage in all U.S. markets. ABC is the first Teletrax client to contract to receive broadcast tracking and analysis across all 210 TV markets in the U.S. ABC Affiliate Marketing utilizes Teletrax to electronically track the broadcast of its on-air television show promotions. The company has also added three new direct response advertising clients to its roster, including media buying agencies RJ Palmer and Tower Media along with a marketing and advertising agency. All will use the Teletrax(TM) suite of broadcast verification services to monitor and track all broadcast, cable and satellite television airings of its short- and long-form direct response programming. Visit: http://www.teletrax.tv/index.php/News/Teletrax/ -- NexGuard, Thomson's forensic watermarking solution for audiovisual content, is now available for set-top boxes and other consumer video devices to address piracy of movies and TV programming without limiting the needs of consumers. NexGuard is addressing cable, satellite and terrestrial operators' security requirements. The solution can be deployed for every device using ST Microelectronics ST 71XX chipset series and various CAS providers. Announcements of integration of the Thomson NexGuard solution for set-top boxes were made at NAB tradeshow by Irdeto, SecureMedia, and Viaccess. Thomson has also unveiled a system capable of digitally watermarking content encoded with Microsoft Windows Media Video 9 (WMV9) or VC-1 Main Profile codecs for circulation of preview copies and on-line content delivery. Visit: http://contentsecurity.thomson.net/ -- Verimatrix announced that its VideoMark(TM) forensic watermarking technology is in the final process of integration with Amino's AmiNET125 set-top box (STB) for commercial deployments. Visit: http://www.verimatrix.com/newsevents/press_releasedetail.php? pressrelease_id=74 (due to the length of the url you may have to copy and paste this link into your browser) -- Widevine announced it has expanded its intellectual property portfolio with the issuance of a patent for digital watermarking. Additionally, TVN Entertainment is now in full commercial deployment with watermarking its entire VOD line-up delivered to all major MSOs and telcos in the U.S with Widevine Mensor(TM). Widevine Mensor watermarking is also being integrated into the company's recently announced protection system for Adobe(R) Flash videos. Visit: http://www.drmwatch.com/article.php/3680811, http://www.nwinnovation.com/widevine_gets_digital_watermarking_patent/ s-0007662.html, http://www.widevine.com/pr/109_cypher_flash.html (due to the length of the url you may have to copy and paste this link into your browser) The Digital Watermarking Alliance was launched in September 2006 to build awareness of the value of digital watermarking to content owners, industry, policy makers and consumers (http://www.digitalwatermarkingalliance.org/). Digital watermarks can identify copyrighted content and associated rights, during and after distribution, to determine copyright ownership and facilitate rights management policy while enabling innovative new content distribution and usage models. Digital watermarks are broadly deployed with billions of watermarked objects and hundreds of millions of watermark detectors in the market, supporting various commercial and government applications. For more information about the Digital Watermarking Alliance, please visit: http://www.digitalwatermarkingalliance.org/ About the Digital Watermarking Alliance The Digital Watermarking Alliance (DWA) is an international alliance of industry leading companies that deliver valuable digital watermarking technology and solutions to a broad range of customers and markets around the world. Member companies include Cinea, Inc., a Dolby company (NYSE:DLB), DataMark Technologies, Digimarc (NASDAQ:DMRC), GCS Research, Gibson, Jura, MediaGrid, Media Sciences International, Philips Electronics, Signum, Teletrax (NASDAQ:MDLK), Thomson (Euronext 18453; NYSE: TMS), Verance, Verimatrix, and Widevine Technologies. For more information, please visit http://www.digitalwatermarkingalliance.org/. DATASOURCE: The Digital Watermarking Alliance CONTACT: Anna Hughes, +1-202-585-0230, , for The Digital Watermarking Alliance Web site: http://www.digitalwatermarkingalliance.org/

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