Music Score Watermarking

Abstract

Music publishers, authors and/or distributors have high quantity of music scores in their archives. In classical music, the original music piece is normally kept in paper format, since its production goes back to many years ago. At present, only new light and popular music pieces are in symbolic notation formats. Light and popular music have a limited lifetime when compared with classical music pieces. The duration of the copyrights for that kind of music is about 60-80 years. Content owners are very cautious to transform their classical music pieces in digital format for e-commerce purposes, because they consider it as a highly risky process which could ultimately lose their copyright ownership. The situation is different when it comes to light and popular music, being market life shorter. According to content owners’ opinion, e-commerce for music distribution cannot be accepted, unless adequate protection mechanisms are provided, as highlighted in WEDELMUSIC (www.wedelmusic.org) and MUSICNETWORK (www.interactivemusicnetwork.org). They accept to have their music protected only if it is possible to control while at the same time the users exploit content functionalities according to the established permissions and prices. To cope with these problems, mechanisms for protecting digital musical objects are used (see Table 1).