TOKYO — In a move to position themselves as winners in the competition for the digital-watermark standard, IBM Corp. and NEC Corp. have agreed to merge their digital-watermark technologies. The standard is being sought by the Copy Protection Technical Working Group (CPTWG), composed of movie studios and computer and consumer-electronics manufacturers.

Once one watermark technology is adopted as the standard by the CPTWG, a huge amount of business will be made from the royalties from the patent and the revenue from the LSI chips needed to detect the electronic watermarks. IBM and NEC are joining their strengths to secure this potentially large business.

Since last year, the CPTWG has been working to develop a digital-watermark standard to protect digital contents from illegal copying. The target date for its implementation in hardware and software is by Christmas of next year.

Thus far, proposals have been made to the CPTWG by Hitachi, IBM, NEC, Philips, Pioneer and Sony. IBM and NEC claimed that their technologies were ranked as the top two in the CPTWG's evaluation.

NEC's technology features "re-marking," which allows one-time copy at homes. Only NEC's proposal contained the same technology, according to an NEC spokesman. The strength of IBM's technology lies in the high durability of its watermark, which withstands repeated compression and decompression, according to an IBM spokesman. The technology, which is registered as DataHiding, was mainly developed by the Tokyo Research Laboratory of IBM Japan.

The two companies plan to integrate their electronic-watermark technologies and to present the results in a single proposal to the CPTWG, hopefully by the next meeting, which is to be held by the middle of next month, according to the IBM Japan spokesman.

In accordance with an agreement between the CPTWG and the Working Group 9 (WG), an organization formed by the DVD Forum for copy protection, the watermark technology that is adopted as a standard will first be installed in DVDs.

When the CPTWG discusses copy-protection technology for DVDs, the WG sends its member delegates to the meeting. Thus, whenever the CPTWG adopts a watermark-technology standard for DVDs, the Forum will also endorse it.

Currently, DVDs have both digital and analog copy protection: a Content Scrambling System (CSS) that scrambles data using cryptograms for digital copy protection, and an Analog Protection System (APS), which prevents copying by generating noise on the video screen. IBM and NEC expect that their watermark technology will supplement the DVD copy-protection measures currently in place.

"The first target is DVDs, but our watermark technology can be used for other digital contents, such as digital satellite broadcasts and digital videocassette tapes," said the IBM Japan spokesman.