Microsoft patents technology for watermarking DRM free music

Microsoft patents technology for watermarking DRM free music

Software giant Microsoft has won a patent for a digital-watermarking technology that works with DRM free music.

The technology has been named “stealthy audio watermarking” and it can be used to insert watermarks in audio signals that can identify the content producer.

The patent is related to providing a signature that is embedded in the audio signal and cannot be removed.

Microsoft had filed for this patent on May 3, 2004 and the technology developers are Darko Kirovski and Henrique Malvar who works for Microsoft Research.

Experts say that these kind of watermarks are hard to detect and even harder to remove. And they have been designed to withstand operations conducted on the file including re-compression.