US 5,613,004 · Granted 1997-03-18

The 1997 Steganography Patent That Hid Ownership Inside Digital Files

Imagine hiding a secret message inside a song or image so well that only someone with the right key can find it. This patent covers a way to embed hidden ownership information directly into digital files—like audio or video—without making them sound or look any different. It's the digital equivalent of a watermark that lives inside the data itself.

Curated and verified by the IsItPatented Editorial team

The plain-English version

What it protects

The claim covers a method for hiding extra information (like ownership or copyright marks) inside digital samples—audio, video, or images—by embedding it at the bit level in a way that requires a special key to decode. What's protected here is the specific process of encoding this hidden data so it stays embedded in the original file, doesn't degrade the file's quality, and resists detection without the proper decryption key. Anyone encoding hidden metadata this way without a license would potentially infringe on the patent.

Why it matters

This patent addressed a critical problem in the 1990s: how to prove you own a digital file and discourage piracy when copying digital content is trivially easy. By embedding ownership proof directly into files in a way that survives copying, this approach created a technical barrier to casual theft. The patent represents early thinking in digital rights management—a field that became central to music, movies, and software distribution as the internet grew.

Real-world use

When you download a movie or song today and wonder how studios track unauthorized copies, steganographic watermarking embedded in the file itself is one of the tools doing that work behind the scenes.

Original USPTO abstract

An apparatus and method for encoding and decoding additional information into a stream of digitized samples in an integral manner. The information is encoded using special keys. The information is contained in the samples, not prepended or appended to the sample stream. The method makes it extremely difficult to find the information in the samples if the proper keys are not possessed by the decoder. The method does not cause a significant degradation to the sample stream. The method is used to establish ownership of copyrighted digital multimedia content and provide a disincentive to piracy of such material.

Patent details

Publication number: US 5,613,004
Filing date: 1995-06-07
Grant date: 1997-03-18
Assignee: The Dice Company
Inventor(s): COOPERMAN; MARC, MOSKOWITZ; SCOTT A.
CPC class: G06T1/0021

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Want to file your own patent?

If you're thinking about building consumer electronics that need to verify or protect digital content ownership, exploring the patent landscape around embedded data protection could reveal opportunities or clearance challenges worth investigating first.

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