SiDiM

The goal of the SiDiM project is to develop new protective measures for e-books and electronic documents. Documents available digitally in text form are particularly vulnerable to uncontrolled distribution, for example via the Internet. This is because, on the one hand, they are very compact in terms of file size compared to multimedia content, and on the other hand, they can be distributed in a particularly wide variety of ways. In particular, when documents have commercial value - ranging from works of fiction to internal trade secrets - the threat of illegal distribution creates a barrier to the use of modern digital distribution channels.

One solution to this problem is to customize documents using visible and invisible markings that distinguish individual copies from one another. This encourages users to handle their copies responsibly and deters them from illegal distribution, as the copies can be traced back to them based on the markings. In SiDiM, therefore, efficient and novel individualization mechanisms based on digital watermarks are to be implemented as a core innovation and integrated into the ebook value chain as a use case.

Partners

SiDiM is an SME-Innovative project funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research. The partners in SiDiM are each assigned to one of the two aspects of research and development. The four participating SMEs - CoSee (consortium lead), 4Readers, juni.com, Notos Rechtsanwälte, and MVB - are engaged in the design, implementation, and validation of an architecture capable of marking, distributing, and retrieving electronic books. Here, great emphasis is placed on practical relevance. The research partners (the Ubiquitous Knowledge Processing Laboratory at TU Darmstadt and the Media Security Group at Fraunhofer SIT) are developing digital watermarks for text documents - as a core innovation - in parallel with the architecture through an iterative process, thereby forming the foundation of the project.

This project (grant number: 01IS10054A) was funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research as part of the KMU-innovativ program.