What is the future for watermarking? (Part II)

We focus on the emerging, nonsecurity-oriented applications of digital watermarking and data hiding in general. Then we consider a more technical topic, i.e., we compare, at a very general level, the two most important approaches to the watermarking problem proposed so far, namely, spread spectrum (SS) and quantization index modulation (QIM) random-binning-like watermarking. A rebuttal to the article by C. Herley, "Why watermarking is nonsense" (IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, vol. 19, no. 5, pp. 10-11, Sept. 2002), is also presented with the intention of starting a discussion open to all the readers, on the controversial points raised by that article.