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Fraunhofer Institute and DivXNetworks Join Forces to Create Multimedia Digital Rights Management Solution
Renowned Research Institute and Pioneering Digital Video Company Work Together to Design and Integrate Secure Systems for Delivery of Audio and Video
San Diego, CA, and Providence, RI, April 3, 2002-DivXNetworks, Inc., the company that created the revolutionary patent-pending DivX™ video compression technology, and the Fraunhofer Center for Research in Computer Graphics (CRCG), Inc., a division of the largest research institute in Europe, today announced a partnership to jointly develop and integrate digital rights management solutions for digital video and audio.

The research and development partnership will leverage Fraunhofer CRCG's digital audio security expertise with DivXNetworks leadership in digital rights management (DRM) for digital video. Fraunhofer CRCG has developed innovative digital security for the distribution of digital audio, including next-generation audio watermarking technology. DivXNetworks has created and implemented a leading solution for protecting high-quality video content that includes content and transaction watermarking, digital encryption, and business rules management. Together, the two organizations will work to refine and improve their multimedia solutions designed to provide content owners with a high degree of security and confidence while offering consumers improved choices for entertainment, education and communication.
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Security Solutions for Multimedia Streaming Environments
Contact Petar Horvatic

Problems with Multimedia Distribution
With over a half a century of technological evolution and constant innovation, the worlds computing infrastructure has perfected a way people live, work, communicate and exist in the cyber world. The science of producing, redistributing, copying and experiencing the digital data, especially high-quality multimedia, has reached serious legal, sociological, economic, and moral implications. The new, rapidly evolving digital distribution paradigm, has left many unanswered questions, in particular those regarding multimedia security, copyright laws, and management of digital rights.

The digital music debacle involved around the occurrence and use of the mp3 audio compression format concerning Napster, internet file swapping program, and RIAA(Recording Industry Association of America) has left everyone wondering if a practical, solutions in managing digital rights and policies is even possible to achieve and enforce in today's world.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) passed by the congress in 1998 has been designed to address the copyright issues in the new era of digital asset management and electronic commerce. However, it has done little to promote a sensible and practical examination of the issue of digital rights management (DRM).

Today, in the post-Napster era, MPAA(Motion Picture Association of America) and major Hollywood studios are faced with the similar future. Hundreds of thousands of unprotected full-length high-quality films are transferred over the Internet daily. Now, more than ever, the need for practical security solutions applied to digital multimedia environments is evident.

Our Solution for Secure Multimedia Distribution
For a number of years, Fraunhofer CRCG, has been developing security technologies geared towards protection of digital multimedia data. Our adaptive, content-based audio techniques provide a simple, effective solution for protection against audio/video piracy by means of added security measures to the digitized audio during production, distribution and use of music. Added security features are implemented in real-time in software, suitable for conventional IP-based audio streaming, and do not compromise by any means, the quality of audio listening or network bandwidth.

One of the most recent multimedia security activities at CRCG is geared toward protection of video streams. Popularity of the new divx, MPEG-4 video format, which aims to deliver DVD-quality movies at bitrates comparable to those of a usual cable modem or a DSL line, threatens to leave the movie industry in jeopardy. For this reason CRCG's goal aims to formulate new security technologies that could provide potential solutions to the newly developing crisis in the video industry. In order to achieve this goal, CRCG will rely on several of our core security technologies while extending them to address the current problems.

http://www.crcg.edu/research/projects/secure_streaming.php3