On Thurrsdays the USPTO publishes new patent applications. Today's Spotlight Applications address various uses of watermarking and fingerprinting. Assigned to IBM, the first application discloses a watermarking system for tracking digital content. The second application discloses ways of using fingerprinting for detecting duplicate and near duplicate files.
20080172747, "Watermarking system for tracking digital content," assigned to IBM.
Abstract
A method is provided for tracking digital content received at a first device. According to the method, a first watermark is embedded in the digital content. The first watermark includes information for identifying a user of the first device and/or information for identifying a licensee of the digital content. The digital content is received from a content provider at the first device. In some embodiments, the first device is an end user device and the embedding is performed by this end user device. In other embodiments, the embedding is performed a source of the digital content, a copyright owner of the digital content, or the content provider.
20080162478, "Detecting duplicate and near-duplicate files," no assignee given.
Abstract
Improved duplicate and near-duplicate detection techniques may assign a number of fingerprints to a given document by (i) extracting parts from the document, (ii) assigning the extracted parts to one or more of a predetermined number of lists, and (iii) generating a fingerprint from each of the populated lists. Two documents may be considered to be near-duplicates if any one of their fingerprints match.
