The Digital Watermarking Alliance (DWA) today announced a new white paper that discusses how digital watermarking can effectively address the copyright and content identification issues facing the peer-to-peer (P2P) and social networking communities. Published by the DWA, the white paper outlines how content owners can embed digital watermarks as content identifiers and digital media serial numbers into entertainment content to communicate the identity of copyrighted works. Because digital watermarks inherently survive the "ripping" process and format conversions, copyrighted songs, movies, TV or radio programming and images can be identified on P2P systems and online communities such as MySpace, YouTube, Google and Yahoo.

With technology that has been proven to be effective in billions of media objects, including music, TV, movies and digital images, P2P and online content sharing providers have the opportunity to work with content owners to deploy systems to detect digitally watermarked content as it is introduced into those systems and help ensure proper usage or compensation in accordance with rights.

The Digital Watermarking Alliance white paper is available at www.digitalwatermarkingalliance.org