The growing importance of watermarking and fingerprinting of digital content will likely push the two different methods - the former, which depends on embedding data in content, and the latter, which identifies content by examining it - closer together over the next four years, according to a panelists speaking at one of the morning breakouts for Jupitermedia’s Digital Rights Strategies ‘07 conference.

Vance Ikezoye, president and CEO, Audible Magic: In five or 10 years, you won’t have panels like this discussing watermarking and fingerprinting. We’ll talk less about the tools and more about what we want to accomplish. The line between fingerprinting and watermarking will be blurred. Today, most applications are around compliance, that is, “How do you stop people from stealing?” New technology involved in the tracking and identifying of content will instead ask how do you enable the monetization of consumption. How do you make the consumer a customer rather than a pirate? As Shamoon said during this morning’s keynote, that’s the question we’re all wrestling with.

Stuart Rosove, senior director, Business Development Media and Entertainment, Digimarc: The advantage of watermarking is the imperceptibility and its versatility. It can change with the content whether it’s being broadcast or downloaded. You have the ability to put watermarks on content all the way through the distribution chain. The content industry thrives on “versioning” - the Spider Man 3 you buy at Wal-Mart is different from the one on the plane or for sale overseas.

Manushantha Sporny, CEO, Digital Bazaar: We’re working with WC3 and Firefox to create collaborative content distribution. How do you get people to be apart of that? By creating watermarks on a webpage through the browser. For example, a blogger talks about the latest U2 CD on a web page, Firefox asks the user if they’d like prices from several online stores. We’re also looking at using open standards, open micro-formats, open watermarking. We see this going towards heavy browser integration and open technologies. Fingerprinting will be combined with watermarking, as well as with other technologies like hashing, which checks the security of a given piece of data or content.

Alex Terpstra, CEO, Philips Content Identification: Trying to address the traditional networks, we’re about to see some changes. Right now, most of the changes have come from new companies, independents. Watermarking will enable the availability of more premium content, such high-def content and early-release content for subscribers. Watermarking will also have a back up method - if it fails somewhere along the distribution chain, it will be able to precisely identify where it failed.