Survey on Decentralized Fingerprinting Solutions: Copyright Protection through Piracy Tracing

Abstract

Copyright protection is one of the most relevant challenges in the network society. This paper focuses on digital fingerprinting, a technology that facilitates the tracing of the source of an illegal redistribution, making it possible for the copyright holder to take legal action in case of copyright violation. The paper reviews recent digital fingerprinting solutions that are available for two particularly relevant scenarios: peer-to-peer distribution networks and broadcasting. After analyzing those solutions, a discussion is carried out to highlight the properties and the limitations of those techniques. Finally, some directions for further research on this topic are suggested.