Watermarking of Electronic Text Documents

With the tremendous development of the Internet, it has become desirable to distribute text documents electronically. However, commercial publishers may be reluctant to offer valuable digital documents online for the fear that they will be re-transmitted or copied illegally. To address this problem, we propose a robust watermarking technique, whereby electronic text documents are fingerprinted with one or more semantics-preserving modifications to the document text. The text modifications may be selected so that multiple copies of the same master document will all have the same meaning. By examining text modifications in an unauthorized copy, one can identify the authorized source and the recepient.