WASHINGTON, May 29 /PRNewswire/ -- The Digital Watermarking Alliance (DWA), an international group of industry leading companies involved in commercializing digital watermarking solutions, announced its endorsement of the Privacy Principles for Digital Watermarking issued today by the Center for Democracy & Technology (http://cdt.org/press/20080529press.php). Digital watermarking is being widely adopted to support new entertainment experiences for consumers, enable new content distribution methods, communicate copyright information, monitor broadcasts and Internet traffic, enhance security of documents, protect brands, and identify specific copies of media. Even though billions of digitally watermarked objects have been successfully deployed without any known privacy issues, and only a very small subset of watermarking applications have any potential bearing on privacy, the DWA believes that by proactively embracing best practices as recommended by the CDT, potential privacy issues can be effectively addressed prior to new solutions being implemented. This will ease the way for broad industry-wide adoption, enable new media distribution models, and enhance access to valuable content for consumers. The DWA also announced it will undertake outreach efforts to ensure digital watermarking applications across all forms of media content are designed with privacy principles in mind, and will continue to advocate for awareness within the industry of the need for strong privacy stewardship in the distribution of digital content. "Digital watermarking has enjoyed broad adoption across many segments of industry and government, and in areas where interoperability is necessary and privacy needs to be safeguarded, we believe watermarking is an ideal solution," said Reed Stager, chairman of the Digital Watermarking Alliance. "The combination of digitally watermarked content and respect for consumer privacy will further broaden adoption and unleash new distribution models. We applaud the Center for Democracy & Technology's focus on digital watermarking and its efforts to gather input from a broad array of stakeholders in developing its recommended best practices." About Digital Watermarking Digital watermarking is the process by which identifying data is woven into media content, giving it a unique, digital identity. Imperceptible to the human senses yet easily recognized by special software detectors, a digital watermark remains constant even through recording, manipulation and editing, compression and decompression, encryption, decryption and broadcast -- without affecting the quality of the content. Digital watermarks can identify copyrighted content and associated rights, during and after distribution, to determine copyright ownership and enable rights management policy while enabling innovative new content distribution and usage models. Today, digital watermarks are broadly deployed with tens of billions of watermarked objects and hundreds of millions of watermark detectors in the market, supporting various commercial and government applications. A recent MultiMedia Intelligence study identified digital watermarking as part of a key growth market that could surpass $500 million by 2012(1). 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 AquaMobile, Cinea, Inc., a Dolby company (NYSE:DLB), DataMark Technologies, Digimarc (NASDAQ:DMRC), GCS Research, Gibson, ISAN-IA, Jura, MarkAny, MediaGrid, Media Sciences International, Philips Electronics, Signum, Streamburst, Teletrax (NASDAQ:MDLK), The Nielsen Company, Thomson (Euronext 18453; NYSE: TMS), Universite Catholique de Louvain, Verance, Verimatrix, and Widevine Technologies. For more information, please visit http://www.digitalwatermarkingalliance.org/ (1) "Beyond Traditional DRM: Moving to Digital Watermarking & Fingerprinting in Media Monetization" published by MultiMedia Intelligence, January, 2008. DATASOURCE: Digital Watermarking Alliance CONTACT: John Raffetto of RH Strategic, +1-206-264-1555, , for Digital Watermarking Alliance Web site: http://www.digitalwatermarkingalliance.org/ http://cdt.org/press/20080529press.php

Copyright