No. 354: A new technology to prevent illegal copies from Dainippon Printing (November 18, 2011)

Dainippon Printing, Japan’s leading printing company, developed a new digital watermarking technology to embed noise data in a music content for the prevention of illegal copies. It is the mechanism to generate a noise in the reproduced sound if an illegally copied sound source is reproduced. The company will conduct the evaluation experiment of this technology with a view to translating it into practical applications, and propose it to production companies and distribution companies of music contents.

The new technology is based on the auditory masking phenomenon that when a big sound and a small sound of relatively close frequencies are reproduced simultaneously, the small sound becomes hard to hear or inaudible. The technology erases the small sound to prevent the auditory masking from working when an illegally copied sound source is narrowed down to the sound territory between 200 Hz and 12 kHz. Thereby, the listener hears the sound source as a noise because only the big sound is reproduced.