Method for fingerprinting multimedia content

To identify participants in collusion directed to altering a digital fingerprint embedded in multimedia content, an ECC based fingerprinting technique establishes a code symbol for each of a plurality of segments of digital data forming the multimedia content. The code symbols are concatenated to form a fingerprint signal, which is subdivided into a plurality of subsegments for each segment in the digital data. The subsegments are permuted and embedded into the digital data. When a suspicious copy of the multimedia content is discovered, the permuted fingerprint signal is extracted from the content and inversely permuted to form a test fingerprint. The identity of one of the colluders is determined by correlation with characteristics of the codeword originally assigned to the user. The determination of identity may be enhanced by the addition of group data embedded as an additional fingerprint in the digital data. Joint consideration of coding and embedding provide benefits over...