In the current environment of computer networks and the proliferation of digital or digitized multimedia content which may be distributed over such networks, a key issue is copyright protection. Copyright protection is the ability to prevent or deter the proliferation of unauthorized copies of copyrighted works. It provides a reasonable guarantee that the author of a copyrighted work will be paid for each copy of that work.
A fundamental problem in the digital world, as opposed to the world of physical media, is that a unlimited number of perfect copies may be made from any piece of digital or digitized content. A perfect copy means that if the original is comprised of a given stream of numbers, then the copy matches the original, exactly, for each number in the stream. Thus, there is no degradation of the original signal during the copy operation. In an analog copy, random noise is always introduced, degrading the copied signal.
The act of making unlicensed copies of some content, digital or analog, whether audio, video, software or other, is generally known as piracy. Piracy has been committed for the purpose of either profit from the sale of such unlicensed copies, or to procure for the “pirate” a copy of the content for personal use without having paid for it.
The problem of piracy has been made much worse for any type of content by the digitization of content. Once content enters the digital domain, an unlimited number of copies may be made without any degradation, if a pirate finds a way to break whatever protection scheme was established to guard against such abuses, if any. In the analog world, there is generally a degradation in the content (signal) with each successive copy, imposing a sort of natural limit on volume of piracy.
To date, three general types of schemes have been implemented in an attempt to protect copyrights.    1) Encryption    2) Copy Protection    3) Content Extensions
Copy Protection and Content Extensions generally apply in the digital world only, while a scheme related to Encryption, commonly known as scrambling, may be applied to an analog signal. This is typical in analog cable systems.
Encryption scrambles the content. Before the content is made ready for delivery, whether on floppy disk, or over a network, it must be encrypted, or scrambled. Once the content has been encrypted, it cannot be used until it is decrypted, or unscrambled. Encrypted audio data might sound like incomprehensible screeching, while an encrypted picture or video might appear as random patterns on a screen. The principle of encryption is that you are free to make as many copies as you want, but you can't read anything that makes sense until you use a special key to decrypt, and you can only obtain the key by paying for the content.
Encryption has two problems, however. 1) Pirates have historically found ways to crack encryption, in effect, obtaining the key without having paid for it; and 2) Once a single legitimate copy of some content has been decrypted, a pirate is now free to make unlimited copies of the decrypted copy. In effect, in order to sell an unlimited quantity of an encrypted piece of software, the pirate could simply buy one copy, which they are entitled to decrypt.
Copy Protection includes various methods by which a software engineer can write the software in a clever manner to determine if it has been copied, and if so to deactivate itself. Also included are undocumented changes to the storage format of the content. Copy protection was generally abandoned by the software industry, since pirates were generally just as clever as the software engineers and figured out ways to modify their software and deactivate the protection. The cost of developing such protection was not justified considering the level of piracy which occurred despite the copy protection.
Content Extension refers to any system which attaches some extra information to the original content which indicates whether or not a copy may be made. A software or hardware system must be specifically built around this scheme to recognize the additional information and interpret it in an appropriate manner. An example of such a system is the Serial Copyright Management System embedded in Digital Audio Tape (DAT) hardware. Under this system, additional information is stored on the disc immediately preceding each track of audio content which indicates whether or not it can be copied. The hardware reads this information and uses it accordingly.
A fundamental problem with Encryption and Content Extension is the “rogue engineer”. An employee who helped design such a system or an individual with the knowledge and means to analyze such a system can modify it to ignore the copyright information altogether, and make unlicensed copies of the content. Cable piracy is quite common, aided by illicit decoder devices built by those who understand the technical details of the cable encryption system. Although the cable systems in question were actually based on analog RF signals, the same principle applies to digital systems.
The practical considerations of weak encryption schemes and rogue engineers have served to limit the faith which may be put in such copyright protection schemes. The invention disclosed herein serves to address these problems with conventional systems for digital distribution. It provides a way to enforce copyright online. The invention draws on techniques from two fields, cryptography, the art of scrambling messages so that only the intended recipient may read them, and steganography, a term applied to various techniques for obscuring messages so that only the intended parties to a message even know that a message has been sent, thus it is termed herein as a stega-cipher. The stega-cipher is so named because it uses the steganographic technique of hiding a message in multimedia content, in combination with multiple keys, a concept originating in cryptography. However, instead of using the keys to encrypt the content, the stega-cipher uses these keys to locate the hidden message within the content. The message itself is encrypted which serves to further protect the message, verify the validity of the message, and redistribute the information in a random manner so that anyone attempting to locate the message without the keys cannot rely on pre-supposed knowledge of the message contents as a help in locating it.