An Anonymous Fingerprinting Scheme with a Robust Asymmetry

Fingerprinting schemes are techniques applied to protect the copyright on digital goods. These enable the merchants to identify the source of illegal redistribution. Let us assume the following situations connectedly happen: As a beginning, buyer who bought digital goods illegally distributed it, next the merchant who found it revealed identity of the buyer/traitor, then the goods is illegally distributed again. After this, we describe it as“The second illegal redistribution”. In most of anonymous fingerprinting, upon finding a redistributed copy, a merchant extracts the buyer's secret information from the copy and identifies a traitor using it. Thus the merchant can know the traitor's secret information (digital fingerprints) after identification step. The problem of the second illegal distribution is that there is a possibility of the merchant's fraud and the buyer's abuse: that is a dishonest employee of the merchant might just as well have redistributed the copy as by the buyer, or the merchant as such may want to gain money by wrongly claiming that the buyer illegally distributed it once more. The buyer also can illegally redistribute the copy again. Thus if the copy turns up, one cannot really assign responsibility to one of them. In this paper, we suggest solution of this problem using two-level fingerprinting. As a result, our scheme protects the buyer and the merchant under any conditions in sense that (1) the merchant can obtain means to prove to a third party that the buyer redistributed the copy. (2) the buyer cannot worry about being branded with infamy as a traitor again later if he never distribute it.