Applying watermarking for copyright protection, traitor identification and joint ownership: A review

The advances in internet and databases application techniques have led to increased demand for remote querying the databases. Access for authorized users has become common, which leads to the problem of copyright protection of relational databases. Copyright protection of outsourced relational databases is also an important issue in today´s internet-based database applications and in many content distribution applications. WATERMARKING is a class of information hiding techniques whose purpose is to identify the sources of data. Unauthorized duplication and distribution can be detected. It has traditionally relied upon the availability of a large noise domain within which the object can be altered while retaining its essential properties. Several applications of watermarking technique like Copyright Protection (Single Ownership and Joint Ownership), Fingerprinting and Tamper Detection and Recovery have been explored here. Also the different approaches for watermarking have been studied. A proposal to have a full fledged copyright protection technique along with fingerprinting, joint ownership and several other features for relational database is expressed.