Digimarc Launches Digimarc(R) Guardian Watermarking for Publishing

BEAVERTON, OR--(Marketwired - Sep 15, 2014) - Digimarc Corporation (NASDAQ: DMRC) today introduced Digimarc® Guardian Watermarking for Publishing. The anti-piracy solution embeds unique, imperceptible and traceable digital watermarks into e-books, enabling distributors and publishers to track where their content is appearing online and identify the sources of leakage and unauthorized distribution. Digimarc also announced that HarperCollins Publishers, one of the largest publishers of consumer books in the world, and LibreDigital, an RR Donnelley company and a leading provider of distribution and fulfillment services for e-book retailers, have adopted Digimarc Guardian Watermarking for the HarperCollins US e-book catalog distributed globally. 

"We are pleased to add this new service to our anti-piracy toolbox," said Chantal Restivo-Alessi, Chief Digital Officer at HarperCollins Publishers. "Part of the value publishers provide is protecting the livelihoods of our authors and ensuring that they're being properly compensated for their work. Digimarc Guardian Watermarks help us identify and stop potential e-book leaks in our digital supply chain that result in piracy. This technology, alongside the monitoring and takedown service, helps us better protect our authors' content."

Digimarc's cloud-based platform offers easy-to-integrate API support for most e-book formats, including EPUB, PDF and MOBI. For each transaction, the platform generates a unique, traceable digital watermark and embeds it throughout the e-book. The imperceptible digital identifiers are extremely difficult for pirates to locate and remove. Adding Digimarc Guardian Watermarks takes just seconds and is invisible to the end customer.

Digimarc's anti-piracy service then crawls the web 24x7 searching for watermarked content. When a watermark is detected, Digimarc provides the unique identifier to the publisher to match against its own transaction records. Digimarc Guardian Watermarks do not contain any personal or user information; the Digimarc Watermarks contain only anonymous digital IDs.

"We view Digimarc Guardian Watermarking as a compelling solution for our customers to help protect their intellectual property and assets," said Tyler Ruse, General Manager at LibreDigital. "It's cost-effective, can be implemented quickly and doesn't interfere with the end-user reading experience. Most importantly, Digimarc has the reach to deliver this service on a global basis with very little impact on logistics."